Dynamically finding the value of a static field with Reflection in .NET C#

Say you do not have access to a .NET assembly at compile time but you want to execute code in it or read programmatic data from it.

One such scenario is when you’d like to extract some important field information from a class. Why would you ever need that?

Imagine that you have an application where people can upload their own plugins in the form of DLL’s. However, users do not programmatically build their own libraries in Visual Studio but rather use a GUI which will dynamically build a class file and compile it into a DLL based on the user’s selections on the GUI. This is possible if your users are not programmers or if the rules for the plugins are so complex that you wouldn’t want people to write their own solutions.

In such a scenario the class builder could write some important metadata in the form of static fields in the class, such as Version. E.g. if your app has multiple versions then the code generator would put the current version into the class so that your app can verify it. Then you can disallow plugins that were created with an older version of the app if the current version is not backward compatible.

Open Visual and create a new C# class library project called Domain. Add the following Customer class to it:

public class Customer
{
	private string _name;

	public Customer() : this("N/A")
	{}

	public Customer(string name)
	{
		_name = name;
	}

        public static readonly int VERSION = 2;
}

Build the solution and locate the compiled Domain.dll library. It should be located in either the Debug or Release folder within the bin folder depending on the compilation configuration in VS. Copy the .dll and put it somewhere else on your main drive where you can easily find it. We’re pretending that you got the library from another source but you for whatever reason cannot reference it at compile time.

Let’s see how we can dynamically extract the version number:

string pathToDomain = @"C:\Studies\Reflection\Domain.dll";
Assembly domainAssembly = Assembly.LoadFrom(pathToDomain);
Type customerType = domainAssembly.GetType("Domain.Customer");
FieldInfo versionInfo = customerType.GetField("VERSION");
int version = Convert.ToInt32(versionInfo.GetValue(null));

You should obviously adjust the path to Domain.dll.

Most of this code looks familiar from the posts on Reflection. We load the DLL and find the field called VERSION on the Customer type. We then extract the value of the field and pass in null as the instance parameter on which the field value should be found. It is null since the field is static, i.e. there’s no need for an instance. This is very similar to what we saw when calling a static method here.