Yet Another C# Blog

It has been a while since my last post. Things get crazy at times. But, here is another bit of sample code for you to muse over. We will look at enumerations and strings. In C#, an enumeration is NOT a string, nor can you define it to be one. An enumeration can be defined as any of a number of integer types. You can leave it as its default type... public enum unspecifiedTypeEnum { one = 1, two, three, } In which case you get named 32 bit values. Or you can specify the type of the underlying value as byte , sbyte , ushort , short , uint , int , ulong or long ... public enum byteTypeEnum : byte { one = 1, two, three, } // or... public enum ushortTypeEnum : ushort { one = 1, two, three, } // etc... ... But, you can't declare it as a string. That doesn't mean you can't use strings at all. When I want to save data to a file for future reference, I like to make my enumerations human readable and store them...

You are trying to come up to speed in C# fast. Then all of a sudden, you come across the C# Generic Type and wonder how do I master that. Well, I've got some good news for you. You are in good company. You thought I was going to say I'll help you master generics. No, that's beyond a simple blog like mine. But, maybe I can help you become proficient. We just have to get the main learning hurdles out of the way. Hurdle #1 - Rationale Generic Types were added to C# in version 2.0. Now, I am not going to go into any detail on the history of C# or generics. I just mention this because the C# team decided they had a serious enough short coming in 1.1 to add this major feature. That is, many, many programmers were opting to ditch type-safety and decent performance in order to write more versatile data structures. How's that? Well, folks (MS included) were writing things like List and Queue and Stack to take "objects". Then their particular data structure ...