Reflection is one of the features of .Net framework and has greater importance during
the development of large applications.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
In brief it is a powerful way of collecting and
manipulate information present in application's assemblies and its metadata. Metadata
contain all the Type information used by the application. The ability to obtain
information at runtime also makes it even more advantageous. When reflection is used
along with system.type, it allows the developer to get the valuable information about
all the types and about the assemblies. We can even create the instances and then
invoke various types that are used across the application.
Reflection is the ability to find out information about objects, the application
details (assemblies), its metadata at run-time
This allows application to collect information about itself and also manipulate on
itself. It can be used effectively to find all the types in an assembly and/or
dynamically invoke methods in an assembly. This includes information about the type,
properties, methods and events of an object and to invoke the methods of object Invoke
method can be used too. With reflection we can dynamically create an instance of a type,
bind the type to an existing object, or get the type from an existing object and invoke
its methods or access its fields and properties. If Attributes (C#) are used in
application, then with help of reflection we can access these attributes. It can be even
used to emit Intermediate Language code dynamically so that the generated code can be
executed directly.
How to use Reflection in our applications?
System.Reflection namespace contains all the Reflection related classes. These classes
are used to get information from any of the class under .NET framework. The Type class
is the root of all reflection operations. Type is an abstract base class that acts as
means to access metadata though the reflection classes. Using Type object, any
information related to methods, implementation details and manipulating information can
be obtained. The types include the constructors, methods, fields, properties, and events
of a class, along with this the module and the assembly in which these information are
present can be accessed and manipulated easily.
As mentioned earlier, we can use reflection to dynamically create an instance of any
type, bind the type to an existing object, or get the type from an existing object. Once
this is done appropriate method can be invoked, access the fields and properties. This
can be done by specifying the Type of object or by specifying both assembly and Type of
the object that needs to be created. By this the new object created acts like any other
object and associated methods, fields and properties can be easily accessed. With
reflection we can also find out about various methods associated with newly created
object and how to use these object. To find out the attributes and methods associated
with an object we can use the abstract class MemberInfo, this class is available under
the namespace System.Reflection.
Share And Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Keywords c# Reflection, c# system reflection, c# net reflection, c# reflection property, c# using reflection,
c# reflection assembly, c# reflection invoke, c# reflection method, vb net reflection,
asp net reflection, c# vb net, reflection c#, windows forms c#, c# net framework,
visual studio net c#, reflection in c#, c# source code
