This is an interesting article. I've been writing C# code for many years but have never used reflection. (I never needed to.) So, your article fills in a gap in my understanding.
I've got a question for clarification. It seems to me that to get the values of a private field, property, or method, I must know the name of the hidden field, property, or method. Am I correct?
That's probably a VERY good sign that you've never needed it!
You only need the name specifically if you are looking for a specifically-named member. I realize that kinda sounds obvious so it's not meant to be facetious haha You can use different reflection methods in order to list out members vs looking for exactly one with a certain name.
So you can use it to list the methods, properties, fields, etc... Anything really. From there, you can make decisions about which ones, or if you just wanted to use the collection of those members for something then you're all set!
If you want the value of exactly one private field/member, yeah, you'll need to identify it by name. But if you wanted the value of every field (regardless of the name) you could ask for all of them, and then just get the name+value that way.
I'm nit-picking here, but your constant use of "Reflection in C#" is a bit annoying. That phrase makes it sound like you're using a product called "Reflection in C#".
Reflection is a .NET concept, not unique to C#. It's just referred to as "reflection".
Thanks for the feedback. The article is leveraging examples in C# specifically and in terms of making the article a bit more discoverable on the internet... SEO is a bit of a factor. Sorry that it was distracting, but I appreciate the feedback on it.
Thanks for the feedback! I think it's an important topic to understand. It's VERY easy to misuse, so I don't suggest using it for all the things But I do think there's a time and a place, and if you understand how it works, at least you're positioned to make better decisions.
Good article, but you are very light on the *Cons*.
1. The performance impact.
2. The ability to screw things up royally.
Reflection is a great tool in the hands of an experienced responsible programmer. In the hands of others, it's a way to hack their way out of a problem rather that solve it properly.
There are very few legitimate reasons to want to change or call a private in a class. They're normally private for a reason.
Thanks for the feedback! For full transparency, this is one article in a planned handful where I want to touch on different aspects of reflection. Unfortunately, it's not an uber article so this just focuses on a handful of possible usages.
Agreed - modifying anything private via reflection is *almost always* not what you want to be doing. Exceptions to everything, but this is a rare one haha I tried to capture that sentiment in this:
Quote:
While being able to modify objects dynamically can be incredibly powerful, it also comes with some risks and considerations. Modifying objects using reflection can introduce complexity and potential pitfalls (read that as: “will likely break things”), such as breaking encapsulation and violating the intended behavior of the object. It’s important to exercise caution and ensure that the modifications made using reflection align with the design and requirements of the system — this *probably* shouldn’t be your first course of action for many things.
I upvoted this because it's very well presented. +5
I just wanted to add for anyone reading that especially when doing a lot of reflection, it's very advantageous performance-wise to create a source generator that does the reflection once, and creates the necessary code to do things without reflection on specific objects as static code.
The result is much faster, and much better at flagging breaking code when a reflected upon interface changes.
Of course this isn't always realistic, but I find about half the time the potential exists for doing this in a project that uses reflection.
Frankly, I find it to be a must in enterprise apps with respect to things like stored procedure generators off entities and things like that.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
Thanks very much for the share! And yes, agreed, with the rise of source generators there's a LOT of super cool stuff that can be done. I appreciate the added context!
Last Visit: 31-Dec-99 18:00 Last Update: 27-Sep-24 14:46