tobin harris

Working with filename strings in C# is always a pain in the ass. Whilst playing around with Golem, I thought it would be nice to be able to have strongly typed access to the file system for when I’m coding file-system related stuff (copying files, clearing log files etc).

What if you could write something like this:

C.Code.Foo.Foo_sln.CopyTo( C.Code.Bar );

I actually wanted a structure that assist with working with .NET solution files, rather than mimicking the file system.

To get the strong typing, I wrote a really crappy bit of code that scans the file-system for a VS.NET solution and generates code for a strongly typed representation of it. So you can then do things like…

   Solution.BuildProject.Configs.Windsor_Dev.File.CopyTo(Solution.WebProject.Directory );
   Solution.BuildProject.Configs.Windsor_Test.File.CopyTo(Solution.TestProject.Directory );

Intellisense on your solution file structure is rather fun! You can’t get that in XML :)

The code to get this isn’t very clever - it just recurses on the FS and generates more c# code, which is a hierarchy of static classes with FileInfo and DirectoryInfo properties that point to the correct places on the file system.

The generated code looks like this:

public static class Solution
{
   ///<summary> Points to c:\Code\Foo\Foo.sln</summary>
   public static FileInfo File = new FileInfo("c:\\Code\\Foo\Foo.sln");

   ///<summarty>Points to c:\Code\Foo\Foo.Build\Foo.Build.csproj</summary>
   public static class BuildProject  
   {
        public static FileInfo File = new FileInfo(...);
        public static class Configs{ ... }
   }
}

I only spent 30 minutes on it, but I quite like the direction it’s taking. Can you think of any cool features?

Would this be a useful standalone OS project?