Summary

This chapter showed you one of the most powerful abilities of the .NET framework: reflection. This is the ability of the Framework to examine itself and invoke things it knows nothing about. There are virtually an unlimited number of things you can do with this ability. You created a sample application to dynamically load a listview from an unknown object with unknown column headers and unknown information. Most importantly, you created a reusable business rule project that will save you countless hours in development time, lines of code, and maintenance costs. You implemented these rules on both the data-centric and user-centric classes and you made a truly self-describing class.

In the next chapter you will move on to one of the hottest topics in Information Technology today: Web services. You will learn a little bit about what they are and you will turn part of your NorthwindTraders application into a Web service. Then you will see how to consume the Web service and publish it using Microsoft's .NET Server 2003 Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI).