Introduction to Reflection

Introduction

Every application is composed of classes and other types, as well as their methods, properties, indexers, and so on. Reflection lets us obtain type information while the program is running. For instance, we could discover what methods a class has, what properties it operates, and what interfaces it implements. Reflection is type discovery at runtime.

The reflective functionality of .NET is located in the System.Reflection namespace. To obtain information on a type, we use the System.Type class. This class has methods like:

• GetMembers(): This returns a MemberInfo[] object.

• GetConstructors(): This returns a ConstructorInfo[] object.

• GetMethods(): This returns information on MethodInfo[] methods.

These are only a handful of the members exposed by the Type class. The list is much longer, but the methods mentioned here provide a general idea about the Type class.

Obtain type information

To obtain information on a type, we must first get an instance of the Type class that’s related to the type we’re interested in. We can do that in three ways:

1. Use the typeof operator

2. Call the GetType() on a type we’re interested in

3. Call the static Type.GetType() method and provide the name of the type