One of the most promising new technologies in the .NET Framework is CodeDom, which stands for the Code Document Object Model. A popular use of the CodeDom is for developing automatic source code generators. The goal of code generators, of course, is to minimize repetitive coding tasks, and to minimize the number of human-generated source code lines being created. The CodeDom namespaces in the .NET Framework allow developers to create their own code generation utilities.
Advantages of CodeDom Technology
The CodeDom namespaces in the .NET Framework provide these advantages:
- The CodeDom is based upon a single model for rendering source code. Therefore, source code may be generated for any language that supports the CodeDom specification.
- The CodeDom allows programs to be dynamically created, compiled, and executed at runtime.
- The CodeDom provides a language independent object model for representing the structure of source code in memory.
- Future releases of the CodeDom could translate source code files between languages a lot like graphic file converter programs do with graphics files today. For example, a VB.NET program could be represented by the CodeDom then translated into C# for another developer. Cool huh?