.NET Common Language Runtime Unleashed

Chapter 17. Reflection

In This Chapter

• Using Reflection to Obtain Type Information

• Using Reflection to Serialize Types

• Late Binding to an Object Using Reflection

• Dynamic Generation of Code

One of the key distinctions between the Microsoft managed environment and the previous unmanaged environment is that the managed environment has a rich and extensible set of metadata that is associated with the code that is running. Of course, this metadata would not be much good if you could not easily access it. The classes that give access to the metadata of a running program are in the System.Reflection namespace.

The System.Reflection namespace contains classes that allow the programmer to obtain information about the application that is running and to dynamically ...