Subclass type usage

I loves reflection. I loves reflection all day long 🙂

Just now I found another nice usage of the not-even-real-reflection Object.GetType() method.

Say we got a framework that works with plugins implementing an abstract class:

public abstract class PluginBase {
    public string ClassName {
        get { GetType ().Assembly.GetName ().Version.ToString (); }
    }
}

Sure we didn’t have to implement this in the actual PluginBase but if we´d by some reason need to use the class name in the plugin base class its good to know that the GetType() always returns the implementing class type.

So the following code:

public class SubClass1 : PluginBase { }
public class SubClass2 : PluginBase { }

void IteratePlugins () {
    var plugins = new PluginBase[] { new SubClass1 (), new SubClass2 () };
    foreach (var plugin in plugins)
        System.Console.WriteLine (plugin.ClassName);
}

Would give us the output:

SubClass1
SubClass2

GetType() is among the most useful class you would find when building frameworks in C#. GetType for president!