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Boxing in C# has little to do with Saturday night television but quite a bit more with that part-time job at the warehouse you had as a student. It is an important concept in C# that is related to how the compiler handles different kinds of variables in memory. Knowing how the compiler handles the various types allows you to avoid unexpected side effects in your code.

This article explains what boxing is, how it works and how it can negatively effect your code if you don’t pay attention to it. We also look at how generics can be used to improve your code’s efficiency. And we try to answer the ultimate question: Is everything in C# an object?

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In this post I look at how we can simply retrieve basic information about our own types, discover their methods and lastly how we can import a foreign assembly, inspect its contents, load a class and execute its methods.

When C# compiles your code it not only stores the program in the assembly but the complete information on each of the structures you have defined. Each class, its types, parameters and methods described into detail are all available. This might sound like stating the obvious, but until recently most compilers treated this kind of “meta” data as a waste of space and never included it into the final assembly.

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