Can I get the instances of alive objects of a certain type in C#?

Question

This is a C# 3.0 question. Can I use reflection or memory management classes provided by .net framework to count the total alive instances of a certain type in the memory?

Answer 1

The only way I see to do this is without any form of instrumentation to use the CLR Profiling API to track object lifetimes. I'm not aware of any APIs available to the managed code to do the same thing, and, so far as I know, CLR doesn't keep the list of live objects anywhere (so even with profiler API you have to create the data structures for that yourself).

VB.NET has a feature where it lets you track objects in debugger, but it actually emits additional code specifically for that (which basically registers all created objects in internal list of weak references). You could do that as well, using e.g. PostSharp to post-process your assemblies.