Security Considerations for Reflection

Microsoft Silverlight will reach end of support after October 2021. Learn more.

Reflection provides the ability to obtain information about types and members, and to access members. In Silverlight, you can use reflection to perform the following tasks:

  • Enumerate types and members, and examine their metadata.

  • Enumerate and examine assemblies and modules.

  • Access public members.

  • Access internal members (Friend members in Visual Basic) in the calling code's assembly. (In reflection, this is referred to as assembly-level access.)

In Silverlight, you cannot use reflection to access private types and members. If the access level of a type or member would prevent you from accessing it in statically compiled code, you cannot access it dynamically by using reflection.