Chapter 5. Reflection and Dynamic Programming
The principles of Reflection in computer science are defined by Wikipedia as:
The ability of a computer program to examine, introspect, and modify its own structure and behavior.
The internal structure of the .NET assemblies we saw in the first chapter allows us to load and invoke types embedded inside our own or foreign assemblies at runtime with a technique called dynamic invocation.
Moreover, classes related to CodeDOM and Reflection.Emit namespaces permit code generation at runtime, either in C# or other languages, including Intermediate Language (IL).
However, beyond the .NET-to-NET dialogs, we can use Interoperability to manipulate applications built in other non-NET programming languages. Actually, many professional applications find it suitable—and very useful—to count on external functionalities that we might detect as present in the host operating system. This means that we can interoperate with Microsoft Office Suite (Word and Excel being...
