Invoke the methods of the assembly is created by reflection from its owner in .NET

Question

I know how to create some object by reflection and pass some arguments.

Dim assembly As System.Reflection.Assembly
Dim control As Object

assembly = System.Reflection.Assembly.Load("WpfControlLibrary1")
control = assembly.CreateInstance("WpfControlLibrary1.Main")

control.Maximize("true")

My question is if there is an approach to get info from "the control" into "the owner" of that "control".

So I guess should be some way to have bidirectional interaction between the owner and created assembly.

For example within some Timer I want get the states of the "control" periodically.

foreach(...)
{

var state = control.GetState(); // ????? Is it possible ?
Sleep(10000);

}

Here we can see how to pass the parameters

So what I need is to get back some returned object up.

Thank you in advance for any useful clue my brothers and sisters in programming!

Answer 1

To invoke method defined on classes in another assembly, you need something like this:

Assembly assembly = Assembly.Load("OtherAssembly");
Type controlType = assembly.GetType("OtherAssembly.OtherAssemblyClass");
object control = Activator.CreateInstance(controlType);

controlType.InvokeMember("SetFullName", BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, null, 
                         control, new object[] { "FirstName", "LastNameski" });

This will invoke the method SetFullName of the class OtherAssemblyClass of the assembly OtherAssembly on the object control, using the parameters "FirstName" and "LastNameski"

object result = controlType.InvokeMember("GetFullName", 
                            BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, null, control, null);

This will invoke a method called GetFullName on that same object, which accepts no parameters (hence the last null in the call) and returns a string.

Console.WriteLine(result.GetType().FullName);

This will print out "System.String"

Console.WriteLine(result);

This will print out "FirstName LastNameski".

---

in the example, the other assembly contains this class:

namespace OtherAssembly
{
  public class OtherAssemblyClass
  {
    private string firstName;
    private string lastName;

    public string GetFullName()
    {
        return firstName + " " + lastName;
    }

    public void SetFullName(string first, string last)
    {
        firstName = first;
        lastName = last;
    }
  }
}