You're reading from Learn C# Programming A guide to building a solid foundation in C# language for writing efficient programs

Product type Paperback

Published in Apr 2020

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781789805864

Length 636 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Tools

.NET

Concepts

Programming Language

Authors (4):

Raffaele Rialdi

Ankit Sharma

Prakash Tripathi

Marius Bancila

View More author details

Table of Contents (20) Chapters

Preface

1. Chapter 1: Starting with the Building Blocks of C#

2. Chapter 2: Data Types and Operators FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 3: Control Statements and Exceptions

4. Chapter 4: Understanding the Various User-Defined Types

5. Chapter 5: Object-Oriented Programming in C#

6. Chapter 6: Generics

7. Chapter 7: Collections

8. Chapter 8: Advanced Topics

9. Chapter 9: Resource Management

10. Chapter 10: Lambdas, LINQ, and Functional Programming

11. Chapter 11: Reflection and Dynamic Programming

12. Chapter 12: Multithreading and Asynchronous Programming

13. Chapter 13: Files, Streams, and Serialization

14. Chapter 14: Error Handling

15. Chapter 15: New Features of C# 8

16. Chapter 16: C# in Action with .NET Core 3

17. Chapter 17: Unit Testing

18. Assessments

19. Other Books You May Enjoy

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Understanding reflection

The unit of deployment in .NET is the assembly. An assembly is a file (either an executable or a dynamic-linked library) that contains Microsoft Intermediary Language (MSIL) code, as well as metadata about the content of the assembly and, optionally, resources. Tools such as ildasm.exe (IL Disassembler), distributed with Visual Studio; ilspy.exe (an open-source project); or others allow you to view the content of the assembly. The following is a screenshot of ildasm.exe that shows the chapter_11_01.dll assembly, available with the source code of this book:

Figure 11.1 – Disassembled source code for chapter_11_01 assembly

Reflection is the process of runtime type discovery and the ability to make changes to them. This means that we can retrieve information about types, their members, and attributes at runtime. This brings several important benefits: