Programming in the .NET Environment

Dynamic Discovery of Types

The dynamic discovery and instantiation of types is becoming increasingly important in modern software architectures. Why? Traditionally, programming languages and systems held to the notion that as much as possible should be known at compile time. It is true that the more information is available to the compiler, the potentially more type-safe and efficient the executable code could be. But it is also true that this approach leads to platform-specific code that is very difficult to migrate and execute on different systems. With the recent widespread use of distributed systems, such as the Internet, more dynamic facilities have become a necessity. In addition, today's programs must frequently deal with types that are ...