We saw several aspects of programming that have to do with the ability of .NET Framework to introspect its own assemblies and invoke its functionality in a standard fashion and even use CodeDOM's possibilities to generate code at runtime, enabling a generation of templates and other code fragments at will.

We also saw a brief intro to Reflection.Emit just to check how it's possible to generate IL code at runtime and insert it into other executable code.

In the second part of this chapter, we covered the most common scenarios used in Office Automation, a technique that allows us to call functionalities included in Office, such as Excel and Word, and interact with them via proxy libraries (the Primary Interop Assemblies) in a way in which we gain almost absolute control over the other applications, being able to pass and recover information between our application and the Office partner via instructions emitted to these proxies.

We finally included a short introduction to the new way of building components, which appeared in version 2013 of Office (Office apps) and saw the basic architecture of these types of components, reviewing the basic template Visual Studio offers and modifying it to include a simple, double direction functionality via Office JavaScript Object Model.

In the next chapter, we will focus on database programming, covering the foundations of interactions with relational models available in Visual Studio.