Anonymous Types and Generics
March 5th, 2009
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C# 3.0 has a “nice” Feature called “Anonymous Types”.
Basically it is great for LINQ where you want to create a Type on the fly.
To create such a Type just use
var myAnonymousObject = new {
Firstname = "John",
Lastname = "Doe"
};
Now you possibly want to extend that a little and have a Function return a List of such a Type.
You can’t use List<T> because you don’t know the Type. You could use a List<object> but that’s not nice. It’s better to use a Feature called “Casting by Example”.
An Example Function implementing this Feature could look like:
public List<T> GetList<T>(T exampleObject)
{
List<T> newList = new List<T>();
// TODO: Fill the List somehow
return newList;
}
You can then call this Function like this:
var someList = GetList(
new {
Firstname = "",
Lastname = ""
}
);
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