I'm working with some, unfortunately largely undocumented, existing code and I'm having trouble understanding how it calls upon the methods of the plugins it loads.
My aim at the moment is simply to step into one of the methods loaded via the plugin manager, as it's causing an exception. However I had to rebuild the pluginManager from the source to get debug symbols and when I reference this new DLL version the compiler throws up arms.
The code appears to load the plugin into plug.Instance and then access the specific methods like so plug.Instance.ReturnLeaNumber();
This compiler error makes sense, because it doesn't know the details of the plugins. What confuses me is how the compiler ever knew these where valid before run time, when no plugins are initialized. I can step through the code that doesn't work now with the older DLL!
This is an example of where the program loads up a plugin.
plug = GenericServicePlugins.AvailablePlugins.Find(Application.StartupPath + "\\Dlls\\SchoolInterface.dll");
// Compiler doesn't like this next line anymore though
plug.Instance.Initialize(null, null);
If there are any differences between my rebuilt library and the previously working one, I can't tell how as the versions match up with the ones in our source control. Would appreciate some advice on where to start looking!
public interface IGenericPluginMasterInterface
{
String returnName();
void Initialize(ExceptionStringResources.Translate ExceptionStrings);
Object ExecuteFunction(String macAddress, bool log, String functionName, LoginCredentials logonCredentials, WebConfiguration webConfig,
Int64 dataLinkId, DataLinkParam[] dataLinkParams, String dataName,
DataParam[] dataParams, Object[] additionalParams);
}
Rest of Manager code on PasteBin
How does the compiler know about these plug.Instance.Method() methods before runtime?
Edit:
I've not quite worked this out yet, but there was a "PluginsService" file I missed which partly mirrors the "GenericPluginServices".
I think this error could have been caused when I removed parts of this class that related to an now defunct plugin, which I am looking into. However I figured posting this other code snippet would help the question.
PluginService.cs code
GenericPluginService code
Find returns AvailablePlugin, so .Instance is of type IGenericPluginMasterInterface; if so, indeed; that .Instance.ReturnLeaNumber() can't possibly work...
The only way that could work (without introducing some generics etc) is if .Instance actually returned dynamic. With dynamic the name/method resolution is happening at runtime. The compiler treats dynamic very deliberately such as to defer all resolution to runtime, based on either reflection (for simple cases) or IDynamicMetaObjectProvider (for more sohpisticated cases).
However, if the code you have doesn't match what was compiled, then: we can't tell you what it was. IMO, the best option is to get hold of the working dll, and look at it in reflector to see what it is actually doing, and how it is different to the source code that you have.
Actually, strictly speaking it could still do that with the code you've pasted, but only if plug is typed as dynamic, i.e. dynamic plug = ...
Related
I have the following code. The CustomControlHelper generates an instance of an object via reflection. At this stage we don't know what type of object we are dealing with. We do know it will be a CustomControl, but we don't know if it implements any particular interface or if it extends any other classes. The following code is trying to establish whether the loaded control implements the IRichAdminCustomControl interface.
Object obj = CustomControlHelper.GetControl(cc.Id, cc.ControlClass);
if(obj != null)
{
bool isWhatWeWant = (obj is IRichAdminCustomControl);
return isWhatWeWant;
}
That's all fine, but I've noticed that when I know I have an object that implements IRichAdminCustomControl, the expression evaluates to false.
Okay, this is where it gets really weird. If I inspect the code when debugging, the expression evaluates to true, but then if I immediately let the code run and inspect the result, it evaluates to false (I've attached an animated gif below to illustrate).
Has anyone come across weirdness like this before and if so, what on earth is causing it?
Incidentally, I believe the product I'm using uses Spring.NET to provide dependency injection in the CustomControlHelper.
If you are using Visual Studio 2010 SP1, I came across this bug:
Misreporting of variable values when debugging x64 code
There is a workaround on that page, posted by Microsoft:
You can either set all projects to compile to x86, or create an intermediate initialised variable declaration to ensure the debugger reports the correct value of the variable being examined.
Try this as a workaround:
bool isWhatWeWant = true;
isWhatWeWant &= (obj is IRichAdminCustomControl);
bool finalValue = isWhatWeWant; // this line should fix isWhatWeWant too in the debugger
return finalValue;
EDIT: seems like VS2012 also encounters similar problems in specific conditions.
Two possibilities come to mind. The first is that your interface name is generic enough that it could already be in the namespace somewhere. Try fully qualifying the interface in the is clause. The second possibility is that you might be running the code as part of a constructor, or being called indirectly by a constructor. Any reflection like stuff needs to be done after we are certain the application has fully loaded.
So I found the answer. It was because I had two copies of the dll in different locations. I had one copy in the bin of my back-end application and one in a shared external directory that gets dynamically loaded by the backend app.
I should explain; this application consists of two apps running in tandem, a frontend app and a backend app. Ordinarily, you place "Custom Controls" into your frontend app. These controls are then copied on application start to a external directory that is accessible to the backend app.
In this case, I had logic in my Custom Control library that needed to be accessed in the backend app - so I had to make a reference to it... which ended up with the backend app having two references to the same class. D'oh! And OF COURSE that's going to work when you're debugging.
Solution was to split my extra logic into its own project and reference THAT in the backend app.
I'm not going to "accept" my own answer here because, although it solved my specific problem, the solution is a bit TOO specific to the apps I'm working with and would be unlikely to help anyone else.
This happened to me once and even though I never came to a conclusion as to why it was happening I believed the PDB files that were being loaded with the debugging symbols where out of sync. So, by "cleaning" the solution and then rebuilding the solution this weird issue went away.
I am not even sure if this is possible so apologies if not. I have googled quite extensively and not found what I am looking for.
Basically we have an application produced by a third party, which, to be perfectly blunt is rubbish. We have a particular issue and have managed to trace the problem using ILSpy to a method within a DLL. Obviously we don't have (nor are able to get) the source code and the company in question is unwilling to fix the problem in any reasonable timescales.
So, we've investigated various avenues of investigation and come up with nothing. I've been looking into seeing whether this can be done using reflection and this is pretty much the last hope we have of getting this to work. In a nutshell, what I would like to do is the following:
Create a simple class library with the same name as the existing DLL
Use reflection to import the methods from the existing DLL
Somehow override the method in question with my own, correct code
Rebuild the code, so I have a new DLL, containing 99% of the functionality of the existing DLL but with my override code providing the correct functionality.
I have found, during my investigations TypeBuilder.DefineMethodOverride and also a page from StackOverflow, which seems similar but not quite what I am looking for.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.reflection.emit.typebuilder.definemethodoverride.aspx
Is there a way to "override" a method with reflection?
Any advice appreciated!
Andrew
Edit
The other possible idea I has was to produce a partial class containing the override function, but that didn't seem feasible either.
You can override the method only if it is virtual, and it doesn't matter whether you do it through reflection or statically. I would suggest using a decompiler (there are a lot of free ones available) and fixing the code in MSIL. Then you can generate a new assembly from the MSIL.
I think your first idea is good.
If the third party class isn't sealed, you can derive from it, and add your own method, with a different name, to correct the behavior that is wrong.
If you need it to be in 1 dll, you can use IlMerge.
If your third party class is sealed you can just have an instance of this third party class in your new class and call the methods when needed.
But you'll have to check that the method you want to "override" isn't called inside that library, because if it is this solution won't work...
It's not very clean, but it can be a temporary solution during the time the company that edits the library fixes the problem.
And when it's fixed you'd just have to rename the method you use, so it won't be time consuming.
From what you have described I would recommend modifying the original assembly. The process is essentially
Decompile the assembly into MSIL, C# or whatever language you so choose
Modify the decompiled assembly to include your changes
Recompile the assembly using the modified source
From what I can see Reflexil allows you to do just that, although it may require that you buy Resharper (I've not tried it myself)
Alternatively you can use ILDasm to decompile the entire assembly to a single file, modify the file and then recompile it using ILAsm
I know I'm coming in a bit late on this, but I'd agree with Charleh; if you've got a class that's not behaving well and isn't conducive to substitution, but at least declares its methods as virtual, then you're in luck. The following uses references to Castle.Core and Patterns:
var interceptor = new DelegateInterceptor(proceed: call =>
{
if(ShouldCallProceed(call)) call.Proceed();
else AlternativeLogic();
});
var generator = new ProxyGenerator();
var proxy = generator.CreateClassProxy<UncooperativeType>(interceptor);
proxy.RubbishMethod();
I've also taken the liberty of providing a running sample of this in LinqPad. It shows the difference between methods that allow interception (virtual ones) and ones that don't. It also shows a useful way of trapping exceptions without all the code using Try.Do from Patterns.
I need to use a iOS build setting in Unity3d that strips unused classes from bytecode but as it uses static analysis to discover which to remove- so any classes resolved through reflection will not be excluded from removal unless explicitly added to an exclusion list. I managed to remove all uses of reflection in my own code, but Mono itself seems to use a reflection based configuration to do a bunch of stuff and I've already added about a dozen classes to the exclusion list but now I'm to the point where exceptions are not giving any clues as to what class needs to be excluded for them to work.
My question is, is it possible to get a precise list of all the classes (with source assembly and namespace) resolved through reflection throughout every assembly that the application uses, and how would you go about it? I have Visual Studio 2012 and while I know it has powerful debugging tools I don't know how I would use them to this end.
Thanks.
The short version
You can't as there is no way to find all lookups via reflection using static analysis.
The long version
Just think of the following example: I write code that selects a class depending on user input, e.g. in pseudo code:
string action = ... ; // get some user input here, e.g. "Fire"
string clazz = "Do" + action;
var obj = Activator.CreateInstance("MyActions", clazz);
As you can see the actual full class name is not occuring anywhere in the code. So you would need to execute the code in every possible way to find out which values the clazz variable could assume. Therefore you cannot find out which classes this code would access via reflection.
Further Questions
What exact API from Mono are you using and what kind of exceptions are you getting? Maybe there is some alternative that could be used for your purpose.
I'm getting an unexpected RuntimeBinderInternalCompilerException when passing an object as a dynamic argument.
I'll try to explain the scenario, as it's too involved to paste code easily.
I'm doing some really weird hackery with Roslyn, so it's going to sound odd.
Execute application
Monitor source code for changes
Recompile what is effectively a diff of the assembly with the changed files/classes
Load the new compiled assembly into the original AppDomain
Pass existing object instances to the new/changed code as Dynamic, so the new code can operate on existing context/application state.
This dynamic passing should work, because the type is compatible: i.e., in my case I can guarantee it has functionally matching methods/types.
But when I go to execute the changed+reloaded method, and it receives an object of type dynamic, I'm getting this exception.
RuntimeBinderInternalCompilerException was unhandled.
An unexpected exception occurred while binding a dynamic operation
Per MSDN:
Exceptions of this kind differ from RuntimeBinderException in that
RuntimeBinderException represents a failure to bind in the sense of a
usual compiler error, whereas RuntimeBinderInternalCompilerException
represents a malfunctioning of the runtime binder itself.
Google has absolutely no results for this. I don't know how to debug further into it either. Any suggestions?
( I did do some sandbox testing to assure myself that I could load different assemblies at runtime into a test application and pass instanced types from different assemblies to a single method accepting a dynamic parameter. So it does work in that scenario. )
It's difficult to answer the question without more details, but reading what you've said, there are a few things to note:
Internally, all type names are fully qualified. This means that the compiler will reject your code if you try to treat two types as the same unless they are from the same assembly, with the same namespace and name. Getting slightly different types to mesh in .Net is tricky.
dynamic doesn't always work as you might intuitively think. If you're playing with the compiler, it's very much worth learning how IL works, and looking at both your code and the base-class-library code to see how they interact.
A very useful tool for low-level .Net work is ILSpy: http://ilspy.net/
I have wondered about the appropriateness of reflection in C# code. For example I have written a function which iterates through the properties of a given source object and creates a new instance of a specified type, then copies the values of properties with the same name from one to the other. I created this to copy data from one auto-generated LINQ object to another in order to get around the lack of inheritance from multiple tables in LINQ.
However, I can't help but think code like this is really 'cheating', i.e. rather than using using the provided language constructs to achieve a given end it allows you to circumvent them.
To what degree is this sort of code acceptable? What are the risks? What are legitimate uses of this approach?
Sometimes using reflection can be a bit of a hack, but a lot of the time it's simply the most fantastic code tool.
Look at the .Net property grid - anyone who's used Visual Studio will be familiar with it. You can point it at any object and it it will produce a simple property editor. That uses reflection, in fact most of VS's toolbox does.
Look at unit tests - they're loaded by reflection (at least in NUnit and MSTest).
Reflection allows dynamic-style behaviour from static languages.
The one thing it really needs is duck typing - the C# compiler already supports this: you can foreach anything that looks like IEnumerable, whether it implements the interface or not. You can use the C#3 collection syntax on any class that has a method called Add.
Use reflection wherever you need dynamic-style behaviour - for instance you have a collection of objects and you want to check the same property on each.
The risks are similar for dynamic types - compile time exceptions become run time ones. You code is not as 'safe' and you have to react accordingly.
The .Net reflection code is very quick, but not as fast as the explicit call would have been.
I agree, it gives me the it works but it feels like a hack feeling. I try to avoid reflection whenever possible. I have been burned many times after refactoring code which had reflection in it. Code compiles fine, tests even run, but under special circumstances (which the tests didn't cover) the program blows up run-time because of my refactoring in one of the objects the reflection code poked into.
Example 1: Reflection in OR mapper, you change the name or the type of the property in your object model: Blows up run-time.
Example 2: You are in a SOA shop. Web Services are complete decoupled (or so you think). They have their own set of generated proxy classes, but in the mapping you decide to save some time and you do this:
ExternalColor c = (ExternalColor)Enum.Parse(typeof(ExternalColor),
internalColor.ToString());
Under the covers this is also reflection but done by the .net framework itself. Now what happens if you decide to rename InternalColor.Grey to InternalColor.Gray? Everything looks ok, it builds fine, and even runs fine.. until the day some stupid user decides to use the color Gray... at which point the mapper will blow up.
Reflection is a wonderful tool that I could not live without. It can make programming much easier and faster.
For instance, I use reflection in my ORM layer to be able to assign properties with column values from tables. If it wasn't for reflection I have had to create a copy class for each table/class mapping.
As for the external color exception above. The problem is not Enum.Parse, but that the coder didnt not catch the proper exception. Since a string is parsed, the coder should always assume that the string can contain an incorrect value.
The same problem applies to all advanced programming in .Net. "With great power, comes great responsibility". Using reflection gives you much power. But make sure that you know how to use it properly. There are dozens of examples on the web.
It may be just me, but the way I'd get into this is by creating a code generator - using reflection at runtime is a bit costly and untyped. Creating classes that would get generated according to your latest code and copy everything in a strongly typed manner would mean that you will catch these errors at build-time.
For instance, a generated class may look like this:
static class AtoBCopier
{
public static B Copy(A item)
{
return new B() { Prop1 = item.Prop1, Prop2 = item.Prop2 };
}
}
If either class doesn't have the properties or their types change, the code doesn't compile. Plus, there's a huge improvement in times.
I recently used reflection in C# for finding implementations of a specific interface. I had written a simple batch-style interpreter that looked up "actions" for each step of the computation based on the class name. Reflecting the current namespace then pops up the right implementation of my IStep inteface that can be Execute()ed. This way, adding new "actions" is as easy as creating a new derived class - no need to add it to a registry, or even worse: forgetting to add it to a registry...
Reflection makes it very easy to implement plugin architectures where plugin DLLs are automatically loaded at runtime (not explicitly linked at compile time).
These can be scanned for classes that implement/extend relevant interfaces/classes. Reflection can then be used to instantiate instances of these on demand.