Is GetType() a method or a class?

Question

I came across this code :

int myInt = 0;
textBox1.Text = myInt.GetType().Name;

According to the .NET documentation, GetType() is a method, not a class.

My question is that how am I able to use the dot with a method, like this GetType().Name?

Answer 1

A method can return a class instance, here it´s an instance of the class Type. On this object you can access properties, other methods, etc.

Your code could be written as this:

int myInt = 0;
Type t = myInt.GetType();
textBox1.Text = t.Name;

Maybe it´s easier to understand that way.

Edit: A method call like GetType() executes the method, and everything you do after the . applies to the return value of the method, in this case an object of type Type.

Answer 2

GetType() is a method that returns an instance of a class (in this case, an instance of the Type class.

Members of that returned instance of Type are accessed via the dot syntax.

Answer 3

Because GetType() returns an instance of an object, you can use the dot to access properties or methods of the object that it returns.

Answer 4

The term is commonly know as chaining (certainly in C# and JavaScript) or fluent interface.

So as the other two answers suggested, you are return an instance and executing the methods that are part of that class.

To quote wikipedia:

In software engineering, a fluent interface (as first coined by Eric Evans and Martin Fowler) is an implementation of an object oriented API that aims to provide for more readable code.

A fluent interface is normally implemented by using method chaining to relay the instruction > context of a subsequent call (but a fluent interface entails more than just method chaining). Generally, the context is defined through the return value of a called method self-referential, where the new context is equivalent to the last context terminated through the return of a void context.