Creating an object without knowing the class name at design time

Question

Using reflection, I need to investigate a user DLL and create an object of a class in it.

What is the simple way of doing it?

Answer 1

Try Activator.CreateInstance.

Answer 2

System.Reflection.Assembly is the class you will want to use. It contains many method for iterating over the types contained with a user DLL. You can iterate through each class, perhaps see if it inherits from a particular interface etc.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.reflection.assembly_members.aspx

Investigate Assembly.GetTypes() method for getting the list of types, or Assembly.GetExportedTypes() for the public ones only.

Answer 3

You can create an instance of a class from a Type object using Activator.CreateInstance, to get all types in a dll you can use Assembly.GetTypes