Bill Wagner

Building binary components sometimes means utilizing late binding and reflection to find the code with the particular functionality you need. Reflection is a powerful tool, and it enables you to write software that is much more dynamic. Using reflection, an application can be upgraded with new capabilities by adding new components that were not available when the application was deployed. That's the upside. With this flexibility comes increased complexity, and with increased complexity comes increased chance for many problems. When you use reflection, you circumvent C#'s type safety. Instead the invoke members use parameters and return values typed as object. You must make sure the proper types are used at runtime. In short, using reflection makes it much easier to build... (more)

Implementing Patterns with Generics

It's been a few months since Visual Studio 2005 was released. In that time you've probably seen and read quite a bit about generics. Unfortunately all those articles and presentations can leave you with the impression that generics are useful only in the context of collections (List, Dictionary, Queue, and so on). It's true that many of the most common uses of generics involve ... (more)

C#3.0-LINQ

C# 3.0 represents a radical new approach to .NET development. The new language features were added primarily to support Language Integrated Query (LINQ), allowing you to query data using the same constructs regardless of where the data is currently stored. However, you'll find that there are many things you can do with these new features outside of queries. There's a learning curve for t... (more)