Compile Time Reflection in C#

Straight from the source - this is a blog post by a C# language designer, and the "User" in this post asks about the same questions as you and is answered. The author says there would be a need to specify a syntax for every metadata item you'd want to ask for and it's not trivial - ie. which overload you want, if you want "info-of" method and the method is overloaded? What if there are generics and explicit interface implementations involved? And so on. It turns out, while it wasn't deemed worthy of implementation in 2009 because of those reasons, we will get it in C# 6 in 2015 - see C# Language Design Notes for Jul 9, 2014 .

In C# 6.0, a new operator, nameof, is being added that will allow you to get the names of properties, classes, fields, events, and variables at compile time.

Link to the design notes

No more reflection for information the compiler already knows at design time!

I was having a similar problem. Only recently discovered that .NET Framework 4.5 has a feature called the Caller Info attributes. By using these, you can obtain information about the caller to a method at compile time. You can obtain file path of the source code, the line number in the source code, and the member name of the caller.

public void DoProcessing()
{
    TraceMessage("Something happened.");
}

public void TraceMessage(string message,
        [CallerMemberName] string memberName = "",
        [CallerFilePath] string sourceFilePath = "",
        [CallerLineNumber] int sourceLineNumber = 0)
{
    Trace.WriteLine("message: " + message);
    Trace.WriteLine("member name: " + memberName);
    Trace.WriteLine("source file path: " + sourceFilePath);
    Trace.WriteLine("source line number: " + sourceLineNumber);
}