Monday, July 31, 2006

 

Dynamic Code Generation vs Reflection

Extract from an interesting code project article.

Dynamic Code Generation vs Reflection

Introduction
This is an example of how to use the new DynamicMethod class in .net 2.0 as an alternative to Reflection. Specifically, this example shows how to instantiate an object and get/set properties and fields on an object. As an added bonus, this code sample also allows getting and setting private fields and properties as well as instantiating objects with private constructors.

Background
At my current company we have built our own Object-Relational-Mapper (ORM), similar to nHibernate. In order to do this we were using reflection to set the properties/fields of an object with the values we retrieved from the database using a DataReader. Also, one of the features that was important to us was the ability to have “Read Only” properties on our objects. This involved setting the private field with our data mapper, instead of the public property. Unfortunately, reflection is a bit slow, especially when using it to set private values.

Solution
Fortunately, along came .Net 2.0 and the DynamicMethod class. This is a new class that allows one to create and compile code at run time. This approach is much faster then using reflection (see the times on the screen shot above). The down side to this approach is that you need to write your dynamic code using IL (as opposed to c#). But, with only a few lines of code we were able to create the desired effect.

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