Gabriel Bogéa Perez

Using reflection is pretty straight forward and that's why I found it weird that I was trying to get all the Dependency Properties for the Silverlight ComboBox but I was only getting the fields defined in the class itself. None of the fields found in the base classes where being retrieved. Only then I learned something new about reflection and static fields. Here is the code I expected to work but doesn't.

FieldInfo[] fields =
     typeof (ComboBox).GetFields(BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.Public);

When reflecting over a class to get all it's static fields you will find out that static fields from base classes are really not retrieved by default. And since all Dependency Properties are static fields you can't get the DP's from the base classes. If you want to retrieve all the static fields in a class hierarchy you need a special BindingFlag: BindingFlags.FlattenHierarchy. This will bring all your static fields including the one from the base classes.

 FieldInfo[] fields =
     typeof (ComboBox).GetFields(BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.Public |
                                 BindingFlags.FlattenHierarchy);