It was
Toronto Code Camp time once again and this year was a wonderful follow-up to the first Toronto Code Camp held last year. Special thanks to MVP
Chris Dufour for organizing this fantastic event as well as giving the best talk of the day, which was on Windows Communication Foundation.
It’s always a good combination between well-dressed nerds and those of us that continue to perpetuate various geek-culture stereotypes. I, for one, go with the glasses, plaid shirt, tan pants, and suspenders. I love the code camps because they are one of the rare times that I realize that I am not alone in my sense of fashion and my love of Doctor Who.
This year I spoke on Reflection – one of my favorite aspects of .NET (and aptly stolen from Java). Reflection allows you to discover an object’s type at runtime if you don’t already know it and query the structure of the classes. You can also invoke methods, change properties, and play with events all dynamically at runtime.
It’s great for creating a plug-in architecture as well as creating a generic business object validator or a generic data access layer. It’s also handy for hacking a DLL if you don’t have the source code.
Reflection is a fairly advanced topic and assumes good foundational knowledge of object oriented programming. My big concern was being able to communicate this topic effectively so as to open up everyone’s understanding in the course of an hour. Based on the comments I received, the mission was accomplished.
One thing is for certain: it is both humbling and encouraging that I have managed to travel this far in the geek’s journey to be able to impart knowledge and understanding to others. But I’m still young in the journey and have a lot of recursions to go before I either return 0 or hit a stack overflow exception.
Happy Coding
- Shaun