Question

I’ve been working with some code that I needed to add a module too and I thought I had everything set up correctly but this last bit has got me stumped.

It seems relatively simple, I’m passing in a type to a Generic Method

var name typeof(T).AssemblyQualifiedName;

So that I can then do this

var type = Type.GetType(name);

however it’s throwing an exception at that last line with name being null

I’ve been reading around type reflection I know that GetType expects the fully qualified assembly name but I don’t understand why it’s coming back as null.

Does it mean I’m doing something fundamentally wrong with my code as i assumed that AssemblyQualifiedName is emitted from a type as it knows how it’s been referenced?

Answer 1

Well AssemblyQualifiedName can return null:

The assembly-qualified name of the Type, which includes the name of the assembly from which the Type was loaded, or null if the current instance represents a generic type parameter.

It doesn’t look like it should actually represent a generic type parameter if you’re really just using typeof(T) – unless the generic method is being called via reflection in some bizarre way.

Why are you trying to use Type.GetType though? It sounds like all you need is

var type = typeof(T);

… wouldn’t that do exactly what you want? Why go via the name of the type?