Questions about Making reflection fly and exploring delegates...
If I need to create delegates Func<T, TResult>
to methods on dynamically loaded types I could potentially use (1) Delegate.CreateDelegate
(2) DynamicMethod
(3) Expression
trees.
Lets say the set of dynamically loaded types/methods are reflected once at application startup via config and used throughout the lifetime of the app (start-up performance is not an issue and neither is memory), the delegates are cached and dispatched to in a strongly-typed way. These delegates are hot paths accessed concurrently.
Which dynamic binding method would you prefer and why?
If they're actually existing methods which you have a MethodInfo
for, and they have the right signatures, then I'd say Delegate.CreateDelegate
is the right way to go - it does exactly what you want, with no fuss. I'd use DynamicMethod
or expression trees if I needed to build a delegate to execute some logic which wasn't already captured in a method.
Expression trees are (IMO, and I haven't used DynamicMethod
in anger) slightly easier to use than DynamicMethod
, but they're more restricted - basically they can only represent a single expression (which could call another method, of course). DynamicMethod
gives you lots of flexibility, but you need to understand IL reasonably well.
Does that help?
Via Ayende's blog I got this interesting link which shows off the kind of things you can do with Dynamic Methods. As an example it is quite understandable:
Accelerating Enum-Based Dictionaries with Generic EnumComparer
Update
One should note that in the world of WinRT, Reflection.Emit
is unavailable - some information can be found here