Comments on: Dynamic reflection versus static reflection

By: Michael Freidgeim

Michael Freidgeim — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 12:04:00 +0000

According to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7061237/static-reflection-performance static reflection is slower than classic one.

By: Mark C

Mark C — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:16:01 +0000

I think that referring to the use of lambda expressions as static reflection is a bit of a misnomer. While you gain the advantage of not using magic strings, the actual lambda function is generated dynamically by the expression.Compile() method (which, IIRC, uses Reflection.Emit under the hood).

By: Gabriel N. Schenker

Gabriel N. Schenker — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:17:28 +0000

@raj: I have not done any research about the performance of the two approaches. But in my experience the performance usually is not an issue wherever I use static reflection… But the increased robustness of the code is a clear benefit

By: Gabriel N. Schenker

Gabriel N. Schenker — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:14:57 +0000

@Xor: where ever you don’t want to use “magic” strings you use static reflection. Examples of well known projects are
-Fluent NHibernate, NHibernate 3.0 (trunk uses static reflection to define criteria queries), FuBu MVC, Fluent Silverlight and others

By: Xor

Xor — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:05:34 +0000

Hi,
I loved the way you explain it in a clearer way.

mapper.Map(entity, “Name”, writer);
mapper.Map(entity, e => e.Name, writer);

I have a question,
If I know the entity type then I should know it’s member I am trying to get value of. If I am unsure of the name of the member I do type “entity”(as in example) and press dot in visual studio to get the list of available members using intellisense , so Magic string is not a big problem

I would be more than happy to know what are the application areas of the Static reflection, and I hope you write them
Thank you very much.

By: raj

raj — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:47:42 +0000

Nice one…

Is static reflection faster than dynamic reflection? Do you have any idea?

By: john

john — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:06:26 +0000

very nice, i wish java had this, we have the magic strings =/

By: ThorHalvor

ThorHalvor — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:18:56 +0000

Hi,
Tnx for some great posts! I have added you to my top 10 list now
- I would like to point out that the link to the “lamda-explanation-post” is incorrect.Both from this post and some of the other posts you got. there is a typo in the url “/blogs/gabrielschenker/blogs/gabrielschenker/archive/”.

By: Gabriel N. Schenker

Gabriel N. Schenker — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:06:01 +0000

@Tom: there is an “infinite” number of possibilities for what static reflection can be used. A good example is code generation (e.g. HTML snippets –> see the FubuMVC project on Google Code). Another example is the mapping of entities to database tables as shown by “Fluent NHibernate”

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:22:11 +0000

Hi Gabriel, excellent post. But I wonder, is there any other use for this construction other than mapping properties?

Could you elaborate on that one?

KR,
Tom