How to instantiate an object with a private constructor in C#?

Question

I definitely remember seeing somewhere an example of doing so using reflection or something. It was something that had to do with SqlParameterCollection which is not creatable by a user (if I'm not mistaken). Unfortunately cannot find it any longer.

Can anyone please share this trick here? Not that I consider it a valid approach in development, I'm just very interested in the possibility of doing this.

Answer 1

// the types of the constructor parameters, in order
// use an empty Type[] array if the constructor takes no parameters
Type[] paramTypes = new Type[] { typeof(string), typeof(int) };

// the values of the constructor parameters, in order
// use an empty object[] array if the constructor takes no parameters
object[] paramValues = new object[] { "test", 42 };

TheTypeYouWantToInstantiate instance =
    Construct<TheTypeYouWantToInstantiate>(paramTypes, paramValues);

// ...

public static T Construct<T>(Type[] paramTypes, object[] paramValues)
{
    Type t = typeof(T);

    ConstructorInfo ci = t.GetConstructor(
        BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic,
        null, paramTypes, null);

    return (T)ci.Invoke(paramValues);
}