Using Reflection

Abstract

Reflection is the ability of code to examine itself. The fact that code has the ability to examine itself should come as no surprise because this ability is needed for even such mundane tasks as figuring out the particular address of a method that needs to be called. But Microsoft has taken the mundane and made it spectacular. Microsoft has given you the ability to examine code. The fact that code has knowledge of itself is nothing new, but just because the code knew about itself did not mean you could get that information. And then Microsoft introduced one more awesome ability: You can create custom attributes with which to tag your code, and you can read these attributes using reflection. This is something unique to the.NET Framework.