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Tired of writing repetitive boilerplate code? Enter .NET Source Generators - your key to automating code generation at compile time.

In this session, we'll explore and demystify this powerful feature that lets you inspect your codebase and generate new C# source files during compilation.

You'll learn how to create source generators from the ground up, including working with the Roslyn compiler API to analyze syntax trees, semantic models, and symbols. Don't worry, it's actually easier than it sounds! We'll explore practical techniques for traversing your codebase, filtering syntax nodes, and generating precise, context-aware code that integrates seamlessly with your existing projects.

Through hands-on examples, we'll implement source generators that solve real-world problems. We'll cover examples like creating strongly typed entity IDs to prevent primitive obsession, generating boilerplate code, auto-implementing interfaces, building compile-time helpers and more.

This session is designed for intermediate to advanced .NET developers, team leads and architects looking to improve code maintainability, as well as anyone interested in meta-programming and code generation.

After this session, attendees will gain a thorough understanding of source generator architecture and lifecycle, along with practical knowledge of working with the Roslyn API for code analysis. They'll learn essential techniques for debugging and testing source generators, good practices for implementing them in production projects, and acquire a toolkit of ready-to-use patterns for some common source generation scenarios.

NDC Conferences

A conference talk walkthrough of .NET incremental source generators, covering how they hook into the Roslyn compiler pipeline to generate code at compile time. Practical examples include: generating strongly-typed ID structs from an attribute, auto-registering dependency injection services, binding and validating IOptions configuration classes from external schema files, and generating object-to-DTO mapping extension methods with compile-time type checking. The talk explains the scout/predicate/transformer/collect pipeline pattern for performance, how to emit diagnostics as compiler errors, and how to test generators using snapshot testing with the Verify library instead of the clunky two-Visual-Studio debugging approach.

Code that writes code - .NET Source generators - Glenn F. Henriksen - NDC London 2026