Can i Do object reflection in C#

Question

I have two classes, Dog and Cat

class Dog
{
    public void speak() {
         System.out.println("Woof!");
    }
}
class Cat
{
    public void speak() {
         System.out.print("Meow!");
    }
}

In my main, I take the name as String, either "Cat", or "Dog".

public static void main(String [] args)
{
    Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
    String name = sc.next();
    Class<?> cls = Class.forName(name);
    Object object = cls.newInstance();
}

Can i do this in C#??

Answer 1

Line by line it would be:

public static void Main(string[] args)
{
    string name = Console.ReadLine();

    // The second true will ignore case
    var cls = Type.GetType("Animals." + name, true, true);

    var @object = Activator.CreateInstance(cls);
}

with the various animals like:

namespace Animals
{
    public class Dog
    {
        public void speak()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Woof!");
        }
    }

    public class Cat
    {
        public void speak()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Meow!");
        }
    }
}

I've added a namespace to make it a "more complete" example: in .NET you can have your code *outside" any namespace, but normally you'll use a namespace. I'm prepending it to the name of the class obtained from the console ( "Animals." + name ).

Note that this code is quite useless, because without a base interface / class , you can't easily make them speak() (you can go full reflection/dynamic from this point onward to do it but it is "bad")

Bad way with dynanic:

dynamic @object = Activator.CreateInstance(cls);
@object.speak();

(note that I'm not supporting what you are doing , it is bad in multiple ways)