Reflection in C sharp is a powerful feature that allows a program to examine and modify its own metadata and behavior at runtime. This means you can inspect types, create instances dynamically, invoke methods, and access properties without knowing them at compile time. Here's a simple example showing how to create an instance and invoke a method using reflection.
The core components of reflection in C sharp are found in the System dot Reflection namespace. The main classes include Type for representing type information, Assembly for loaded assemblies, MethodInfo for method metadata, PropertyInfo for properties, and FieldInfo for fields. These classes provide the foundation for examining and manipulating program elements at runtime.
Reflection has many practical applications in C sharp development. It's commonly used in frameworks and libraries, serialization systems, dependency injection containers, plugin architectures, and unit testing frameworks. For example, JSON serialization libraries use reflection to automatically inspect object properties and convert them to JSON format without requiring manual mapping code.
While reflection is powerful, it comes with significant drawbacks. It has performance overhead, causes loss of compile-time safety, increases code complexity, and makes debugging harder. To mitigate these issues, cache reflection results, use it sparingly in performance-critical code, consider alternatives like generics, and always validate types at runtime.
To summarize, reflection in C sharp is a powerful feature that enables runtime examination of types and members. The core components include Type, Assembly, and various Info classes. It's commonly used in frameworks, serialization systems, and dependency injection containers. However, it comes with performance overhead and complexity trade-offs, so use caching and consider alternatives when possible.