Reflection

While trying to speed up an application I searched the internet for information about reflection. I use reflection quite often when I have to write a special XML serializer or when I have to write a simple OR mapper. The problem is that it is slow. I understand now also because you have to specify the type when you use the XmlSerializer of the .Net framework. Internally it generates IL code which speeds up the serialization a lot because the intermediate code is much faster than direct reflection.

Regarding this problem I found a very interesting blog post which you can check out here.

There a comparison is made between the direct reflection, reflection by using Reflection.Emit and by caching Reflection.Emit operations. As you can see there from the test results the cached reflection is about 8 times faster!! This may not be of importance if you serialize only 100 objects but if you serialize thousands or millions of objects than this makes a big difference.

I tried his code in a project of mine where I use quite a lot reflection and indeed the operation finished about 6 times faster!

If you do a lot of reflection in your projects you should definitely give a look at this code. It's worth...