Listing the properties of an object

Sometimes you just want to print out the state of some reasonably rich object (for logging or GUI mock-up or whatever). This code gives you a PropertyGetter class with two easy-to-use static methods. listProperties returns a name: value string listing of the properties on the input object, for easy logging.

If you want the object's properties as a list of properties you can get that as well.

NB: This simple class does not recurse through complex objects, so you will only ever get the top-level of a property.

Code:

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Text;

namespace Code_Examples {
 class PropertyGetter {
  public static string listProperties(object someObject) {
   StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

   List<pair> props = getProperties(someObject);

   foreach (Pair prop in props) {
    sb.AppendLine(prop.Name + ": " + prop.Value);
   }
   return sb.ToString();
  }

  public static List<pair> getProperties(object someObject) {
   List<pair> dic = new List<pair>();

   PropertyInfo[] props = someObject.GetType().GetProperties();
   foreach (PropertyInfo prop in props) {
    Pair t = new Pair {
     Name = prop.Name,
     Value = prop.GetValue(someObject, null)
    };
    dic.Add(t);
   }
   return dic;
  }
 }

 public class Pair {
  public string Name {
   get;
   set;
  }
  public object Value {
   get;
   set;
  }
 }
}