Creating a plug-in interface using C# and .Net Reflection
I finally had the excuse recently to look into creating my very own plug-in interface. A plug-in essentially allows a piece of software to load dll files (more pieces of code) that it knows virtually nothing about before runtime. I was very impressed at how simple this is using .Net and its reflection implementation. When I began to research this topic, I found all kinds of articles that show you how to achieve this in a particular way. I would later find out that the common way to go about it is very inefficient. The reason for this is that .Net's reflection implementation has some very inefficient routines. Reflection is sluggish by nature; the parts of reflection that are not so sluggish were given special optimization attention because they are commonly used by .Net. I won't go into much more detail on this because I am by no means an expert on the matter, but I will point you to some very good literature. This article will explain some of the insides of reflection a...