4.8 Reflection and Metadata

The .NET runtime depends heavily on the existence of metadata and the ability to inspect and manipulate it dynamically. The FCL exposes this via a set of abstract classes that mirror the significant elements of an application (assemblies, modules, types, and members) and provide support for creating instances of FCL types and new types on the fly(see Section 3.10 in Chapter 3).

For more information, see the following namespaces:

System.Reflection
System.Reflection.Emit

Important related types in other namespaces include System.Type, System.Activator and System.AppDomain.