Reflection

All .NET assemblies have metadata information stored about the types defined in modules. This metadata information can be accessed by mechanism called as “Reflection”. System. Reflection can be used to browse through the metadata information.

Reflection can also be used to create applications called type browsers, which enable users to select types and then view the information about those types.

There are other uses for reflection. Compilers for languages such as JScript use reflection to construct symbol tables. The classes in the System.Runtime.Serialization namespace use reflection to access data and to determine which fields to persist. The classes in the System.Runtime.Remoting namespace use reflection indirectly through serialization.