Easiest way to inject code to all methods and properties that don't have a custom attribute

Question

There are a a lot of questions and answers around AOP in .NET here on Stack Overflow, often mentioning PostSharp and other third-party products. So there seems to be quite a range of AOP optons in the .NET and C# world. But each of those has their restrictions, and after downloading the promising PostSharp I found in their documentation that 'methods have to be virtual' in order to be able to inject code (edit: see ChrisWue's answer and my comment - the virtual constraint must have been on one of the contenders, I suppose). I haven't investigated the accuracy of this statement any further, but it's categoricality made me return back to Stack Overflow.

So I'd like to get an answer to this very specific question:

I want to inject simple "if (some-condition) Console.WriteLine" style code to every method and property (static, sealed, internal, virtual, non-virtual, doesn't matter) in my project that does not have a custom annotation, in order to dynamically test my software at run-time. This injected code should not remain in the release build, it is just meant for dynamic testing (thread-related) during development.

What's the easiest way to do this? I stumbled upon Mono.Cecil, which looks ideal, except that you seem to have to write the code that you want to inject in IL. This isn't a huge problem, it's easy to use Mono.Cecil to get an IL version of code written in C#. But nevertheless, if there was something simpler, ideally even built into .NET (I'm still on .NET 3.5), I'd like to know. [Update: If the suggested tool is not part of the .NET Framework, it would be nice if it was open-source, like Mono.Cecil, or freely available]

Answer 1

I was able to solve the problem with Mono.Cecil. I am still amazed how easy to learn, easy to use, and powerful it is. The almost complete lack of documentation did not change that.

These are the 3 sources of documentation I used:

• static-method-interception-in-net-with-c-and-monocecil
• Migration to 0.9
• the source code itself

The first link provides a very gentle introduction, but as it describes an older version of Cecil - and much has changed in the meantime - the second link was very helpful in translating the introduction to Cecil 0.9. After getting started, the (also not documented) source code was invaluable and answered every question I had - expect perhaps those about the .NET platform in general, but there's tons of books and material on that somewhere online I'm sure.

I can now take a DLL or EXE file, modify it, and write it back to disk. The only thing that I haven't done yet is figuring out how to keep debugging information - file name, line number, etc. currently get lost after writing the DLL or EXE file. My background isn't .NET, so I'm guessing here, and my guess would be that I need to look at mono.cecil.pdb to fix that. Somewhere later - it's not that super important for me right now. I'm creating this EXE file, run the application - and it's a complex GUI application, grown over many years with all the baggage you would expect to find in such a piece of, ahem, software - and it checks things and logs errors for me.

Here's the gist of my code:

DefaultAssemblyResolver assemblyResolver = new DefaultAssemblyResolver();
// so it won't complain about not finding assemblies sitting in the same directory as the dll/exe we are going to patch
assemblyResolver.AddSearchDirectory(assemblyDirectory);
var readerParameters = new ReaderParameters { AssemblyResolver = assemblyResolver };

AssemblyDefinition assembly = AssemblyDefinition.ReadAssembly(assemblyFilename, readerParameters);

foreach (var moduleDefinition in assembly.Modules)
{
    foreach (var type in ModuleDefinitionRocks.GetAllTypes(moduleDefinition))
    {
        foreach (var method in type.Methods)
        {
            if (!HasAttribute("MyCustomAttribute", method.method.CustomAttributes)
            {
              ILProcessor ilProcessor = method.Body.GetILProcessor();
              ilProcessor.InsertBefore(method.Body.Instructions.First(), ilProcessor.Create(OpCodes.Call, threadCheckerMethod));
// ...

private static bool HasAttribute(string attributeName, IEnumerable<CustomAttribute> customAttributes)
{
    return GetAttributeByName(attributeName, customAttributes) != null;
}

private static CustomAttribute GetAttributeByName(string attributeName, IEnumerable<CustomAttribute> customAttributes)
{
    foreach (var attribute in customAttributes)
        if (attribute.AttributeType.FullName == attributeName)
            return attribute;
    return null;
}

If someone knows an easier way how to get this done, I'm still interested in an answer and I won't mark this as the solution - unless no easier solutions show up.