Removing an Event from a WinForm ListView control using reflection

The objective was to remove an event from a WinForm control that we don't have the source code for (and can't recompile and remove the event on directly on the source code).

This problem happened originally when dynamicaly consuming Cat.NET's guis (outside VisualStudio) and there were a couple controls (like a ListView) that hooked event handlers that triggered functions that had DTE dependencies (which triggered an exception since we were running Cat.NET outside visualstudio (and the DTE2 object was null).

There doesn't seem to be an easy way to do this (and google didn't find a good solution) so using O2's powerful reflection APIs I was able to find a solution which is now available as these extensionmethods:

	//for a UserControl (in fact any control that implements System.ComponentModel.Component)
	var userControl = new UserControl();
	//we can get the current mapped event handlers
	userControl.eventHandlers();
	//its signature
	userControl.eventHandlers_MethodSignatures();
	//remove one by using the static field name
	userControl.remove_EventHandler("EVENT_SELECTEDINDEXCHANGED");
	//or use this one specifically mapped to the SelectedIndexChanged event
	userControl.remove_Event_SelectedIndexChanged

view raw gistfile1.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Here is a document that shows how these extension methods were created: