Reflection
Reflection is the API used to read CLI metadata. The reflection API provides a logical view of metadata rather than the literal view provided by tools like metainfo. Reflection in version 1.1 of the .NET framework can be used to inspect the descriptions of classes and their members, and invoke methods. However, it does not allow runtime access to the CIL for a method. Version 2.0 of the framework allows the CIL for a method to be obtained.
Read more about this topic: Metadata (CLI)
Famous quotes containing the word reflection:
“With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan,—mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufacturers and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man’s own worthiness from other men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)