Question

I have a auto-generated .c file containing const’s and enum’s I need to access from .Net. I would like to run a pre-build script that would convert the .c file (with C syntax) to a .cs file (with C# syntax). The files are pretty simple so it should be possible to script my way out of this problem.

Here is a section of a .c file

#define Bitfile "Test.bit"

static const char* const BitfileSignature = "A6A316954DA417A2F886F3B0035019B1";

typedef enum
{
   ControlBool_TestBool_Address = 0x815E,
   ControlBool_IrqHandshakeWriteToDma_Address = 0x8112,
   ControlBool_WriteToDma_Address = 0x810E,
   ControlBool_stop_Address = 0x813A,
} ControlBool;

And I would like to convert that into something like this

public static class MyConstants
{
    public static string Bitfile = "Test.bit";
    public static string BitfileSignature = "A6A316954DA417A2F886F3B0035019B1";
}

public enum MyEnum
{
    ControlBool_TestBool_Address = 0x815E,
    ControlBool_IrqHandshakeWriteToDma_Address = 0x8112,
    ControlBool_WriteToDma_Address = 0x810E,
    ControlBool_stop_Address = 0x813A,
}

Does anyone know a good tool I could use for this conversion? Preferably a tool that comes with VS2010.

Answer 1

You can try T4 Text Templates to generate your code files from. It’s nicely integrated into Visual Studio and once you get the hang of it a fairly easy to use and powerful text templating engine. You’ll need to define 2 separate templates (one for C# and one for C) of course.

[EDIT] : It appears i did not read the whole question. The OP problem is converting from C to C#. I still stand by my advice to use T4 in this case but for reading the C source you’ll need to write some custom parsing code. Considering that it involves only enum type definitions the parsing code should be fairly trivial. On the other hand if the C defs are already generated from some external definition (like an xml file somewhere) then you could treat that as a data source