Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

15.6. Understanding Late Binding

Simply put, late binding is a technique in which you are able to create an instance of a given type and invoke its members at runtime without having hard-coded compile-time knowledge of its existence. When you are building an application that binds late to a type in an external assembly, you have no reason to set a reference to the assembly; therefore, the caller's manifest has no direct listing of the assembly.

At first glance, it is not easy to see the value of late binding. It is true that if you can "bind early" to an object (e.g., set an assembly reference and allocate the type using the C# new keyword), you should opt to do so. For one reason, early binding allows you to determine errors at compile time, ...