Visual Basic 2008 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

3.12. Instantiate an Object Using Reflection

Problem

You need to instantiate an object at runtime using reflection.

Solution

Obtain a Type object representing the type of object you want to instantiate, call its GetConstructor method to obtain a System.Reflection.ConstructorInfo object representing the constructor you want to use, and execute the ConstructorInfo.Invoke method.

How It Works

The first step in creating an object using reflection is to obtain a Type object that represents the type you want to instantiate. (See recipe 3-10 for details.) Once you have a Type instance, call its GetConstructor method to obtain a ConstructorInfo representing one of the type's constructors. The most commonly used overload of the GetConstructor method ...