title: Code Generation in Orleans 2.0

Code Generation in Orleans 2.0

Code generation has been improved in Orleans 2.0, improving startup times and providing a more deterministic, debuggable experience. As with earlier versions, Orleans provides both build-time and run-time code generation.

1. During Build - This is the recommended option and only supports C# projects. In this mode, code generation will run every time your project is compiled. A build task is injected into your project’s build pipeline and the code is generated in the project’s intermediate output directory. To activate this mode, add one of the packages Microsoft.Orleans.CodeGenerator.MSBuild or Microsoft.Orleans.OrleansCodeGenerator.Build to all projects which contain Grains, Grain interfaces, serializers, or types which require serializers. Differences between the packages and additional codegen information could be found in the corresponding Code Generation section. Additional diagnostics can be emitted at build-time by specifying value for OrleansCodeGenLogLevel in the target project’s csproj file. For example, <OrleansCodeGenLogLevel>Trace</OrleansCodeGenLogLevel>.

2. During Configuration - This is the only supported option for F#, Visual Basic, and other non-C# projects. This mode generates code during the configuration phase. To access this, see the Configuration documentation.

Both modes generate the same code, however run-time code generation can only generate code for publicly accessible types.