Reflection and generic types

Question

I\'m writing some code for a class constructor which loops through all the properties of the class and calls a generic static method which populates my class with data from

Answer 1

Do you want to call DoStuff with T = the type of each property? In which case, "as is" you would need to use reflection and MakeGenericMethod - i.e.

var properties = this.GetType().GetProperties();
foreach (PropertyInfo p in properties)
{
    object value = typeof(MyClass)
    .GetMethod("DoStuff")
    .MakeGenericMethod(p.PropertyType)
    .Invoke(null, new object[] { p.Name });
    p.SetValue(this, value, null);
}

However, this isn't very pretty. In reality I wonder if it wouldn't be better just to have:

static object DoStuff(string name, Type propertyType);
... and then
object value = DoStuff(p.Name, p.PropertyType);

What does the generics give you in this example? Note that value-types will still get boxed etc during the reflection call - and even then boxing isn't as bad as you might think.

Finally, in many scenarios, TypeDescriptor.GetProperties() is more appropriate than Type.GetProperties() - allows for flexible object models etc.