Don't believe in myths!

Do you think that only C# version 9.0 onwards supports code generators? .NET Framework projects be darned, Visual Basic the usual disgraced son?

Well, think again.

Code generators are a compiler feature, not a language feature. As long as you build your project with the .NET SDK v6.0 and/or Visual Studio 2022, you can benefit from incremental generators, for example.

(Of course you need to use Roslyn as a compiler; therefore, F# projects are not invited to the party - sorry guys, but hey, your language is so cool you don't even need this kind of stuff, right? 😉)

Don't believe me, either: see for yourself.

Instructions for Visual Studio

1. Clone this project.
2. Open CodeGenerationTest.sln in Visual Studio 2022 (v17.2+ recommended) and build the CodeGenerators project.
3. Exit Visual Studio, then open the solution again. This step is needed because VS caches code generators and will not recognize the newly-compiled CodeGenerators.dll until you restart it.
4. Open Program.cs in the CSharpApp project. Verify that there are no errors: both the Hello class and its World property are present in the assembly, despite this project targeting .NET Framework 4.6.1 (thus, by default, using C# 7.3).
5. Open Program.vb in the VisualBasicApp project. Verify that there are no errors: both the Hello module and its World property are present in the assembly, despite this project being in Visual Basic (and, for good measure, explicitly specifying version 15.0 of the language).

Instructions for .NET SDK

On a computer with .NET SDK v6.0 or later installed:

1. Clone this project.
2. Open the operating system shell of your choice in the folder where you cloned this project.
3. Enter the dotnet build command. Verify that there are no errors.