roslyn Archives - Timur and associates

Imagine situation: company runs a business-critical application that was built when WCF was a hot topic. Over the years the code base has grown and became a hot mess. But now, finally, the development team got a go ahead to break it down into microservices. Yay? Calling WCF services from .NET Core clients can be a challenge.

Not so fast

We already discussed some high-level architectural approaches to integrate systems. But we didn’t touch upon the data exchange between monolith and microservice consumers: we could post complete object feed onto a message queue, but that’s not always fit for purpose as messages should be lightweight. Another way (keeping in mind our initial WCF premise), we could call the services as needed and make alterations inside microservices. And Core WCF is a fantastic way to do that. If only we used all stock standard service code.

What if custom is the way?

But sometimes our WCF implementation has evolved so much that it’s impossible to retrofit off the shelf tools. For example, one client we worked with, was stuck with binary formatting for performance reasons. And that meant that we needed to use same legacy .net 4.x assemblies to ensure full compatibility. Issue was – not all of references was supported by .net core anyway. So we had to get creative.

What if there was an API?

Surely, we could write an API that would adapt REST requests to WCF calls. We could probably just use Azure API Management and call it a day, but our assumption here was not all customers are going to do that. The question is how to minimize the amount of effort developers need to expose the endpoints.

A perfect case for C# Source Generators

C# Source Generators is a new C# compiler feature that lets C# developers inspect user code and generate new C# source files that can be added to a compilation. This is our chance to write code that will write more code when a project is built (think C# Code Inception).

The setup is going to be very simple: we’ll add a generator to our WCF project and get it to write our WebAPI controllers for us. Official blog post describes all steps necessary to enable this feature, so we’d skip this trivial bit.

We’ll look for WCF endpoints that developers have decorated with a custom attribute (we’re opt-in) and do the following:

Find all Operations marked with GenerateApiEndpoint attribute
Generate Proxy class for each ServiceContract we discovered
Generate API Controller for each ServiceContract that exposes at least one operation
Generate Data Transfer Objects for all exposed methods
Use generated DTOs to create WCF client and call required method, return data back

Proxy classes

For .net core to call legacy WCF, we have to either use svcutil to scaffold everything for us or we have to have a proxy class that inherits from ClientBase

namespace WcfService.BridgeControllers {
public class {proxyToGenerate.Name}Proxy: ClientBase<{proxyToGenerate}>, {proxyToGenerate} {
    foreach (var method in proxyToGenerate.GetMembers()) 
    {
        var parameters = // craft calling parameters; // need to make sure we build correct parameters here
        public {method.ReturnType} {method.Name}({parameters}) {
            return Channel.{method.Name}({parameters}); // calling respective WCF method
    }
}

DTO classes

We thought it’s easier to standardize calling convention so all methods in our API are always POST and all accept only one DTO on input (which in turn very much depends on callee sugnature):

public static string GenerateDtoCode(this MethodDeclarationSyntax method) 
{
    var methodName = method.Identifier.ValueText;
    var methodDtoCode = new StringBuilder($"public class {methodName}Dto {{").AppendLine(""); 
    foreach (var parameter in method.ParameterList.Parameters)
    {
        var isOut = parameter.IsOut();
        if (!isOut)
        {
            methodDtoCode.AppendLine($"public {parameter.Type} {parameter.Identifier} {{ get; set; }}");
        }
    }
    methodDtoCode.AppendLine("}");
    return methodDtoCode.ToString();
}

Controllers

And finally, controllers follow simple conventions to ensure we always know how to call them:

sourceCode.AppendLine()
   .AppendLine("namespace WcfService.BridgeControllers {").AppendLine()
   .AppendLine($"[RoutePrefix(\"api/{className}\")]public class {className}Controller: ApiController {{");
...
 var methodCode = new StringBuilder($"[HttpPost][Route(\"{methodName}\")]")
                  .AppendLine($"public Dictionary<string, object> {methodName}([FromBody] {methodName}Dto request) {{")
                  .AppendLine($"var proxy = new {clientProxy.Name}Proxy();")
                  .AppendLine($"var response = proxy.{methodName}({wcfCallParameterList});")
                  .AppendLine("return new Dictionary<string, object> {")
                  .AppendLine(" {\"response\", response },")
                  .AppendLine(outParameterResultList);

As a result

We should be able to wrap required calls into REST API and fully decouple our legacy data contracts from new data models. Working sample project is on GitHub.

Every now and then we get asked if there’s an easy way to parse user input into filter conditions. Say, for example, we have a viewmodel of type DataThing:

public class DataThing
 {
     public string Name;
     public float Value;
     public int Count;
 }

From here we’d like to check if a given property of this class satisfies a certain condition. For example we’ll look at “Value is greater than 15”. But of course we’d like to be flexible.

The issue

The main issue here is we don’t know the type of property before hand, so we can’t use generics even if we try to be smart:

public class DataThing
 {
     public string Name;
     public float Value;
     public int Count;
 }
 public static void Main()
 {
     var data = new DataThing() {Value=10, Name="test", Count = 1};
     var values = new List {
         new ValueGetter(x => x.Value),
         new ValueGetter(x => x.Name)
     };
     (values[0].Run(data) > 15).Dump();
 }
 public abstract class ValueGetter
 {
     public abstract T Run<T>(DataThing d);
 }
 public class ValueGetter<T> : ValueGetter
 {
     public Func<DataThing, T> TestFunc;
     public ValueGetter(Func<DataThing, T> blah)
     {
         TestFunc = blah;
     }
     public override T Run(DataThing d) => TestFunc.Invoke(d); // CS0029 Cannot implicitly convert type…
 }

Even if we figured it out it’s obviously way too dependant on DataThing layout to be used everywhere.

LINQ Expression trees

One way to solve this issue is with the help of LINQ expression trees. This way we wrap everything into one delegate with predictable signature and figure out types at runtime:

 bool BuildComparer(DataThing data, string field, string op, T value) {    
     var p1 = Expression.Parameter(typeof(DataThing));
     var p2 = Expression.Parameter(typeof(T));
     if (op == ">")
     {
         var expr = Expression.Lambda>(
             Expression.MakeBinary(ExpressionType.GreaterThan
                                 , Expression.PropertyOrField(p1, field)
                                 , Expression.Convert(p2, typeof(T))), p1, p2);
         var f = expr.Compile();
         return f(data, value);
      } 
      return false;
 }

Code DOM CSharpScript

Another way to approach the same problem is to generate C# code that we can compile and run .We’d need Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.Scripting package for this to work:

bool BuildScript(DataThing data, string field, string op, T value)
 {
     var code = $"return {field} {op} {value};";
     var script = CSharpScript.Create(code, globalsType: typeof(DataThing), options: ScriptOptions.Default);
     var scriptRunner = script.CreateDelegate();
     return scriptRunner(data).Result;
 }

.NET 5 Code Generator

This is a new .NET 5 feature, that allows us to plug into compilation process and generate classes as we see fit. For example we’d generate extension methods that would all return correct values from DataThing:

[Generator] // see https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/blob/main/docs/features/source-generators.cookbook.md for even more cool stuff
 class AccessorGenerator: ISourceGenerator {
     public void Execute(GeneratorExecutionContext context) {
       var syntaxReceiver = (CustomSyntaxReceiver) context.SyntaxReceiver;
       ClassDeclarationSyntax userClass = syntaxReceiver.ClassToAugment;
       SourceText sourceText = SourceText.From($ @ "
         public static class DataThingExtensions {
           { 
           // This is where we'd reflect over type members and generate code dynamically. Following code is oversimplification
             public static string GetValue<string>(this DataThing d) => d.Name;
             public static string GetValue<float>(this DataThing d) => d.Value;
             public static string GetValue<int>(this DataThing d) => d.Count;
           }
         }
         ", Encoding.UTF8);
         context.AddSource("DataThingExtensions.cs", sourceText);
       }
       public void Initialize(GeneratorInitializationContext context) {
         context.RegisterForSyntaxNotifications(() => new CustomSyntaxReceiver());
       }
       class CustomSyntaxReceiver: ISyntaxReceiver {
         public ClassDeclarationSyntax ClassToAugment {
           get;
           private set;
         }
         public void OnVisitSyntaxNode(SyntaxNode syntaxNode) {
           // Business logic to decide what we're interested in goes here
           if (syntaxNode is ClassDeclarationSyntax cds &&
             cds.Identifier.ValueText == "DataThing") {
             ClassToAugment = cds;
           }
         }
       }
     }

Running this should be as easy as calling extension methods on the class instance: data.GreaterThan(15f).Dump();

Tag: roslyn

Calling WCF services from .NET Core clients