Reflection and Metadata — Building the ORM Mapping Engine

Your C# classes already describe their database schema. You just need to learn how to read them.

There's a line of code I've written a thousand times without thinking about it:

var properties = typeof(Customer).GetProperties();

It looks harmless. Almost boring. But the first time I really understood what it does — not just what it returns, but what it means — something shifted in how I think about C#.

That line asks a running program to describe its o…