Reflection

In computer science, reflection is the ability of a computer program to examine and modify the structure and behavior (specifically the values, meta-data, properties and functions) of an object at runtime.

Reflection provides objects (of type Type) that describe assemblies, modules and types. You can use reflection to dynamically create an instance of a type, bind the type to an existing object, or get the type from an existing object and invoke its methods or access its fields and properties. If you are using attributes in your code, reflection enables you to access them.
Reflection is most commonly used in high-level virtual machine programming languages like Smalltalk and scripting languages and also in manifestly typed or statically typed programming languages such as Java, ML, Haskell, C#, Go and Scala.

Reflection is the ability of types to provide information about themselves. For example, an assembly can tell you what it contains, a type can tell you its methods, properties and so on.
Reflection uses the type system. Every compiled C# program is encoded into a relational database—this is called metadata. With reflection we act upon the data in this special database. Astonishing features rely on System.Reflection.

In C#, Reflection objects are used for obtaining type information at runtime. The classes that give access to the metadata of a running program are in the System.Reflection namespace. The System.Reflection namespace contains classes that allow you to obtain information about the application and to dynamically add types, values and objects to the application.
Reflection can be used for observing and/or modifying program execution at runtime. A reflection-oriented program component can monitor the execution of an enclosure of code and can modify itself according to a desired goal related to that enclosure. This is typically accomplished by dynamically assigning program code at runtime.

In object oriented programming languages such as Java, reflection allows inspection of classes, interfaces, fields and methods at runtime without knowing the names of the interfaces, fields, methods at compile time. It also allows instantiation of new objects and invocation of methods.

Reflection can also be used to adapt a given program to different situations dynamically. For example, consider an application that uses two different classes X and Y interchangeably to perform similar operations. Without reflection-oriented programming, the application might be hard-coded to call method names of class X and class Y. However, using the reflection-oriented programming paradigm, the application could be designed and written to utilize reflection in order to invoke methods in classes X and Y without hard-coding method names. Reflection-oriented programming almost always requires additional knowledge, framework, relational mapping, and object relevance in order to take advantage of more generic code execution. Hard-coding can be avoided to the extent that reflection-oriented programming is used.

Reflection is often used as part of software testing, such as for the runtime creation/instantiation of mock objects. Reflection is also a key strategy for metaprogramming.
Reflection has the following uses:

-    It allows view attribute information at runtime.
-    It allows examining various types in an assembly and instantiate these types.
-    It allows late binding to methods and properties

It allows creating new types at runtime and then performs some tasks using those types.