C# Primer Plus

Accessing the Metadata of a Component: A Brief Introduction

We form expressions by combining many different kinds of operands (constants, instance variables, method calls, and so on) from different origins. Sometimes, an operand belongs to the current object; sometimes it is fetched from another object. Irrespective of its origin, each operand's type must be carefully checked to ensure that the final expression returns a meaningful result. Finding the type of an operand has been easy in our examples. With all classes written in a small confined world of familiar C# source code, we have simply found it by looking at the method header or the variable declaration in the relevant class definition. We have then deciphered the meaning of recognizable ...