Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Static method reflection

by fmarguerie via Fabrice's weblog on 7/5/2006 4:06:00 PM

.NET reflection features are powerful and this is really what makes it a powerful platform. We don't use reflection everyday, but when we do it's really useful.
Don't you hate it though when you have to write code like this?:

MethodInfo method = typeof(MyClass).GetMethod("MyMethod");

The problem with this code is that we use a string to identify the method, which means that we don't get compile-time validation.
Ayende has an interesting approach to this problem. He gives you a solution that allows writing the following code instead:

MethodInfo method = GetMethod<int, string>(MyClass.MyMethod);

In this case, everything is strongly-typed and checked by the compiler.

Of course, nothing is perfect and this solution suffers from a number of limitations, but it's an interesting approach anyway. The limitations:

• it works only with static methods,
• the methods need to be accessible (public or in your code's reach),
• we can't use a similar approach for properties.