Programmatically accessing the .NET APIs

Question

Is there a way to retrieve metadata about the .NET APIs?

For example, suppose I'd like to get a list of all the properties defined for System.Windows.Documents.List. It'd be nice to get this information in some structured format such as XML, JSON, etc. Each entry should look something like:

<property name="MarkerStyle" type="TextMarkerStyle" get="true" set="true"/>

I'd like to avoid having to screen scrape the MSDN library. :-)

Answer 1

You could use Reflection to retrieve metadata about existing classes at runtime. The GetProperties method is something you could start with.

Answer 2

You can use Reflection and write some code to do the formatting into XML, JSON etc.

Or you can use a tool like Reflector

Answer 3

Thanks to Darin and Robert for the pointers to the System.Reflection namespace.

Here is a short program which prints out all the public properties of List:

using System;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Windows.Documents;

namespace ReflectionWpfListPropertiesTest
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var members = typeof(List).GetMembers();

            Array.ForEach(members, info =>
                {
                    if (info.MemberType == MemberTypes.Property)
                        Console.WriteLine(info);
                });
        }
    }
}