This Feels Like Cheating

As I was trying to add my messaging page to my blog engine, I wound up needing a helper method to make the invocation easier for the UI. After futzing with it for a second, I realized that generics makes me “get away” with having a generic return value. Look at the following code:

public T Get() where T : class, new()
{
  T returnValue = Activator.CreateInstance();
  return returnValue;
}

This allows me to write the following code:

MessageRequest newRequest = this.Get();
MessageResponse newResponse = this.Get();

This isn’t the exact scenario I’m running into, but what floored me is that I don’t have to have a bunch of Get() methods that are all named different since you can’t overload a method in C# just by a different return type (you can at the CIL level). Rather, I can use a generic method. Granted, there are some restrictions I can put into place, but this technique allows me to write one helper method.

Generics are so awesomo.

Published: 04.11.2006 07:17:45 PM CST

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Jason Bock

This Feels Like Cheating