Work-around for C# CodeDom causing stack-overflow (CS1647) in csc.exe?

Question

I\'ve got a situation where I need to generate a class with a large string const. Code outside of my control causes my generated CodeDom tree to be emitted to C# source and

Answer 1

So am I right in saying you've got the C# source file with something like:

public const HugeString = "xxxxxxxxxxxx...." +
    "yyyyy....." +
    "zzzzz.....";

and you then try to compile it?

If so, I would try to edit the text file (in code, of course) before compiling. That should be relatively straightforward to do, as presumably they'll follow a rigidly-defined pattern (compared with human-generated source code). Convert it to have a single massive line for each constant. Let me know if you'd like some sample code to try this.

By the way, your repro succeeds with no errors on my box - which version of the framework are you using? (My box has the beta of 4.0 on, which may affect things.)

EDIT: How about changing it to not be a string constant? You'd need to break it up yourself, and emit it as a public static readonly field like this:

public static readonly HugeString = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" + string.Empty +
    "yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy" + string.Empty +
    "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz";

Crucially, string.Empty is a public static readonly field, not a constant. That means the C# compiler will just emit a call to string.Concat which may well be okay. It'll only happen once at execution time of course - slower than doing it at compile-time, but it may be an easier workaround than anything else.