Introduction to Reflection

Reflection is a powerful feature of C# which allows the program to interact with types and objects runtime.

Reflection is not a specific kind of a syntax or a method which we use, instead, it is a set of methods and features which can be used to find out useful information of different types at the run time.

For-example, using Reflection, we can

• Get a list of all the public properties of a class;
• Get a list of all the public methods of a class;
• Indirectly invoke methods of an object;
• Dynamically create instances of a class;
• Get the parent class of any specific type;

The classes that enable us to perform reflection are provided in the System.Reflection namespace. Therefore, we need to import System.Reflection before using reflection in our programs:

One very common part of reflection we use in our programs is the GetType method. This method returns the type of any object.

Output:

System.Int32