Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET Programmer's Cookbook

Identify the Caller of a Procedure

Problem

You want your class to determine some information about the calling code, probably for diagnostic purposes.

Solution

Use the System.Diagnostics.StackTrace class.

Discussion

You can’t retrieve information about the caller of a procedure through reflection. Reflection can only act on metadata stored in the assembly, whereas the caller of a procedure is determined at runtime. However, .NET includes two useful diagnostic classes that fill this role: StackTrace and StackFrame.

The stack holds a record of every call that is open and not yet completed. As new calls are made, new methods are added to the top of the stack. For example, if method A calls method B, both method A and B will be on the stack (with method ...