Welcome to the T4 C# Constructor Generator project

T4 C# Constructor Generator is a T4 template for Visual Studio C# projects that lowers the overhead of the C# compiler by generating constructors.

Overview

The SOLID principles advocate small and focused classes, and Dependency Injection advocates injecting all a classes dependencies through the constructor. Especially when classes are small, defining a constructor that does nothing more than the proper null-checks and assigning the constructor parameters to the private fields gives a lot of overhead. It's verbose and it's just noise.

This template tries to lower this overhead and verbosity by searching through all classes in the project and generating a constructor for classes that don't have any constructor defined. You can see it as a change of the behavior of the C# compiler. The C# compiler always generates a public parameterless constructor when no constructor is defined, but this template changes this by generating a constructor that contains all defined private fields of that class.

Example

Take a look at the following class:

public class UserController : Controller
{
    private readonly IRepository<User> userRepository;
    private readonly ILogger logger;
    private readonly ICommandHandler<MoveCustomerCommand> handler;

    public View Index()
    {
    }
}

The T4 C# Constructor Generator template will generate a new partial class with the following constructor:

public UserController(IRepository<User> userRepository, ILogger logger,
    ICommandHandler<MoveCustomerCommand> handler)
{
    if (userRepository == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("userRepository");
    if (logger == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("logger");
    if (handler == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("handler");

    this.userRepository = userRepository;
    this.logger = logger;
    this.handler = handler;

    this.OnCreated();
}

Constraints

This template can only handle C# projects and will only generate constructors for classes that:

Are in the same project as where the template is placed:
Are not static:
Have no explicitly defined constructors:
Have private instance fields;

If you find any bugs of have any feature requests, please report them here.