Contents tagged with C#
Ninja Coding: Composition over Inheritance–Even when Overriding
We’ve all heard it a million times – composition is favourable to inheritance. But inheritance can sometimes come with its own charms. One of its main attractions is to do some grunt work in a base class and have the ability to override that behaviour in a derived class. Framework developers favour an abstract base class as it leaves the potential to add features in the future without breaking all client code. The usual approach towards to polymorphism is achieved by declaring a method (or property) as virtual in the base class and overriding in the derived one(s). And this usually works out quite well (if you do find yourself using inheritance). This would typically look like this:
Introducing MSMSpec
Anonymous Types are Internal, C# 4.0 Dynamic Beware!
C# 4.0 has introduced the dynamic keyword. You can declare a variable as dynamic and regardless of what can be inferred at compile time, you can access any properties and call any methods and your code will still compile. Resolving of those properties and methods will be done at runtime. If at runtime, they aren't found, you'd get a runtime exception. If they are found, your code will run fine.
Fetching a Property Value via Reflection
Reflection is a method by which we can use metadata at runtime to dynamically create an instance of a type, bind the type to an existing object, or get the type from an existing object and invoke its methods or access its fields and properties. It has many uses, ranging from allowing usage of attributes to creating instances of dynamically generated classes and using them. You can even use reflection to read and modify private member variables of an object. Today, we're going to look at a very simple example which will allow us to read the value of a public property given an instance.