How often do you Reflect?

[mendhak]

Do you ever reflect upon your life and wonder about how much you've accomplished and can do?

Oh, and in VB.NET, how often do you use Reflection to work with objects? I was just going through some study material, and came across "Polymorphism through .NET reflection".

I'm wondering about its usage. Frequent? When would I use such a thing?

[wossname]

On reflection I think Reflection is a bit of a black art. I have tried to read up on it but it tends to make me nod off.

From what I can tell, it seems to be a way of examining the contents of assemblies during runtime. So you could write program A today and get it to recognise a DLL written next month. Time travel basically. Simply put it gives you a way to forward-engineer and future proof your programs.

I doubt most people use it at all, but those that do use it use it in most of their apps.

I keep meaning to learn it but I keep falling aslee....zzzz zzzzz zzzzzz zzzzzz zzzzzzz.

[Edneeis]

Reflection is great but its like the corkscrew on a swiss army knife - you don't use it for everything but when you need it its perfect. I use reflection in a lot of the projects at work. It saves me from some maintanence nightmares. You probably already use reflection to some degree and just don't realize it. Serialization is done through reflection - that is how it gets/sets the private members.