What is the best resource for learning C# expression trees in depth?
Chapter 11 (Inside Expression Trees) and chapter 12 (Extending Linq) of Programming Microsoft Linq (ISBN 13: 978-0-7356-2400-9 or ISBN 10: 0-7356-2400-3) has been invaluable for me. I haven't read Jons book, but he is a quality guy and explains things well, so I assume that his coverage would also be good.
Another great resource is Bart De Smet's blog
Also, keep your eye on MSDN, the sample code for building a Simple Linq to Database (by Pedram Rezaei) is about to get about 40 pages of Doco explaining it.
A really, really useful resource for Expression Tree's in fact I would regard it as a must have is the Expression Tree Visualiser debugging tool.
You should also learn as much as you can about Expression Tree Visitors, there is a pretty good base class inplementation here.
Here is some sample code derived from that Visitor class to do some debugging (I based this on some sample code in the book I mentioned) the prependIndent method call is just an extension method on a string to put a "--" at each indent level.
internal class DebugDisplayTree : ExpressionVisitor
{
private int indentLevel = 0;
protected override System.Linq.Expressions.Expression Visit(Expression exp)
{
if (exp != null)
{
Trace.WriteLine(string.Format("{0} : {1} ", exp.NodeType, exp.GetType().ToString()).PrependIndent(indentLevel));
}
indentLevel++;
Expression result = base.Visit(exp);
indentLevel--;
return result;
}
...
I don't claim them to be comprehensive, but I have a number of Expression
posts on my blog. If you are UK based, I will also be presenting a session on Expression
at DDD South West in May (and last night, but too late ;-p). I could post the slide deck and some of the links from related articles, if you want... unfortunately, a pptx intended to be spoken rarely makes sensible standalone reading.
Some other reading (not from the blog):
- Jason Bock: genetic programming with
Expression
- (me again): generic operators with
Expression
- (and again, on InfoQ)
Expression
as a Compiler
(and a whole load of posts here and on microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp - try searching for: +expression -regex -"regular expression"
Learn Scheme. Expressions use the same principles as lambda calculus, and hence will give you some better insight.
Alternatively, you can look at the DLR, which is a similar but much less elegant.