Delphi for .NET Developer’s Guide

Runtime Invocation of a Type’s Members (Late Binding)

Late binding is a process by which an application can invoke a member of a class (including creating that class) without knowing at compile time of that class or its methods. This is a useful technique, particularly when dealing with add-in functionality to applications. Consider the Delphi for .NET development environment. It must somehow have to determine information about the classes to allow you to visually design applications. It is reflection’s capability to perform late binding that enables the IDE to work with classes it does not know about that exist in various assemblies.

To illustrate a simple add-in scheme, the following example consist of two assemblies—both of which define a ...