Question

I need to access third-party classes that may or may not be available. How can we handle a situation like this?

For example:

Class ThirdPartyClass may or may not be available. It has one static variable myInt.

int someInt;
if(ThirdPartyClass is available) // pseudo-code
{
  someInt = ThirdPartyClass.myInt;
} else {
  someInt = 0;
}

Answer 1

You are basically talking about reflection. I am assuming we do not need to try to auto-discover assemblies.

You can do this something along the lines of:

Type t = Type.GetType("<fullyqualifiedname>.ThirdPartyClass", false)
if (t != null) 
{
    FieldInfo fi = t.GetField("myInt", BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Static);
    someInt = (int)fi.GetValue(null);
}
else
    someInt = 0;