Reflection and Assemblies in .NET

The advantages of assembly in .Net over the raw executables that you create in conventional programming are that you get information about the assembly itself. The assembly contains information like version, the files that it contains the type of assembly, and other referenced assemblies.

Single modules are used in an assembly most of the time and these modules have types and these types contain the members. The types are usually classes, interfaces, etc. The members are usually variables, methods and properties.

In .Net System.Reflection is the namespace that contains the classes that are used to get information about an assembly. The Assembly class that is found in the System.Reflection root namespace is used to get this information. Hence with this class it is possible to get the types and members of an assembly.

This helps you to get information about assembly and based on that information you can even load assemblies during runtime. GetInterfaces(), GetMethods(), GetMembers(), and InvokeMethod() are some of the methods available in the class Assembly of the System.Reflection namespace.

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