Rick Strahl talks about new C# 3.0 features, but leaves a few questions…
Why can’t you change the property values instances of anonymous types?
The problem is that instance of anonymous types are hashed by hashing all values. Thus, if values could change, all hashes would have to be updated (impossible with the .NET design) or hashes would not match and all sort of unacceptable side-effects like dictionaries no longer finding their key values.
Visual Basic used a different approach allowing you to identify individual properties as keys with the “Key” keyword. Only these values are readonly, while other properties can be changed.
Why can’t we pass around instance of anonymous types around?
We can! That was my Thanksgiving present this morning. Check this out… from Alex James
You do however need to know the structure in the receiving routine, and you’ll also needs some casts so this isn’t going to be quite as fast as a real class. I wanted to test this approach in VB console project:
Module Module1
Sub Main()Dim x = NewWith {.FirstName = "Fred", .LastName = "Smith"}
Test(x)
Console.Read() EndSub
PrivateSub Test(Of T)(ByVal x As T)
Dim y = x.CastByType(NewWith {.FirstName = "", .LastName = ""}) Console.WriteLine(y.firstName & ", "& y.LastName) EndSub
<System.Runtime.CompilerServices.Extension()> _
PrivateFunction CastByType(Of T)(ByVal x AsObject, ByVal y As T) ReturnCType(x, T)EndFunction
EndModule
The trick is that the cast method takes another anonymous type declaration which matches the one we’re working with. The extension method makes the call look more natural, but I don’t think I’d use it in a real project because CastByType now shows up in Intellisense for every type – anonymous or not.
There’s been some confusion about signatures of anonymous types. These signatures include both name and type, which you can see if you change Test above:
PrivateSub Test(Of T)(ByVal x As T)
Dim y = x.CastByType(NewWith {.FirstName2 = "", .LastName2 = ""}) Console.WriteLine(y.firstName2 & ", "& y.LastName2) EndSub
This results in a runtime error on the cast in the CastByType methods. That’s one more reason to be careful where you use this technique.
Still it’s cool to uncover new things in .NET 3.5.