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Generics are a .Net 2.0 feature that essentially let you abstract out type. You can learn a lot about generics on MSDN.
One problem that generics can solve is how to have a method dynamically return a given type. For example, in the snippet below, the method GetData returns different types depending on what you pass in - either a double or an Int32. This is useful for creating a generalized method to parse out (and potentially validate) data. Note that the consumer of the GetData method need not deal with conversion - it receives a strongly typed value.
While this is just a trivial snippet, it's a nice demo of one of the features of generics.
[TestMethod]
public void DemoGenerics()
{
int i = GetData<Int32>("123");
double d = GetData<Double>("456");
Assert.AreEqual(Convert.ToInt32(123), i);
Assert.AreEqual(Convert.ToDouble(456), d);
}
public static T GetData<T>(string strData)
{
string strType = typeof(T).Name;
switch (strType)
{
case "Int32":
return (T)(object)Convert.ToInt32(strData);
case "Double":
return (T)(object)Convert.ToDouble(strData);
default:
throw new Exception("Type not supported");
}
}
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