April 2007
Intermediate to advanced
551 pages
12h 9m
English
Content preview from Professional Windows® PowerShell
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14.4. Using .NET Reflection
When you use Windows PowerShell to work with .NET Framework objects, you can take advantage of the functionality of .NET reflection. Reflection allows you to look inside an assembly and find out its characteristics. Inside a .NET assembly information is stored that describes what the assembly contains. This is called metadata. A .NET assembly is, in a sense, self-describing, at least if interrogated correctly.
In the .NET Framework, assemblies contain modules, modules contain classes, and classes contain members. Reflection allows you to explore the hierarchy of assemblies, modules, classes, and members.
The System.Reflection namespace, on which .NET reflection is based, is an extensive one. A full discussion of reflection is beyond the scope of this chapter, but the following introduction should help you get started so that you can, from Windows PowerShell, explore in detail the characteristics of .NET classes and types that interest you.
Reflection uses the members of the System.Reflection namespace together with System.Type. In .NET a namespace is simply a named collection.
In the following sections, I introduce several methods that you can use to find detailed information about members, methods, and properties of a .NET class. As the following sections make clear, the method you use will depend on your existing knowledge about the class. These methods can be combined with use of the get-member cmdlet and the GetType() method, if you are starting ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.