Comments on: C# Generics Annoyance

By: Brandon Parker

Brandon Parker — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:58:13 +0000

I think that FxCop only likes you to use the Collection generic, since the other generic classes won’t pass the events on properly, or something like that.

But FxCop complains about a lot of stuff.

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Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:30:29 +0000

[...] C# Generics Annoyance (Chris Brandsma) [...]

By: Chris Brandsma

Chris Brandsma — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:40:25 +0000

Hi Bill,
1. I read that article of yours:
http://blechie.com/WPierce/archive/2008/01/04/Extension-Methods-are-the-Devil.aspx
But I still think extension methods are an elegant way to extend 3rd party apis (like the entire .Net framework) to better suite your needs. The other option is that I could create a custom DropDownList that inherits from DropDownList for the sole purpose of adding the method to it. The extension method is far simpler to implement.

2. I agree it could have been more terse. But I don’t always think terse is good. I will take readability over terse any days. But NameValueCollection is very old school (and only accepts strings — which I’m against), a better option would be the Dictionary object which is more type safe. The downside of the Dictionary object is that the list is indexed by the key, and that isn’t what I always want.

3. I left .Net 1.1 a while back, I don’t even have Visual Studio 2003 installed anymore. Also, I know that FxCop doesn’t think generics should be in a public api. This is a case where I will just disagree with FxCop — especially since my api’s sole purpose in life is to feed data to a web site. It isn’t a very broad range for an api. If I was designing an api for something like SubSonic, I would reconsider that argument, but I still don’t think I would taylor my api to .Net 1.1 anymore.

But, if you have another solution, by all means let me see it. Please. My email is chris.brandsma@gmail.com

By: Chris Brandsma

Chris Brandsma — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:13:33 +0000

Steve: collection initializers are very nice, and I didn’t completely forget about them. If you include the Collection initializers with object initializers you could actually remove the constructors from the NameValue object all together. And I thought of doing just that. I decided against it when I saw all the extra code you would have to write to make it work.

But I will probably have to modify the post to show collection initializers now.

By: Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:30:36 +0000

Hey Chris,
First off, Extension Methods are the Devil, so don’t envy those 3.5 mofos too much.

Second, your code would be much more terse if you used a NameValueCollection rather than List.

Ah but you say its IEnumerable implementation is flawed. Quite true, but you could write a simple implementation in less than 100 lines of code. Or you could ask to see my implementation. Plus this will work for those stone age development environments like .Net 1.1.

-Bill

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:14:52 +0000

That should have been List

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:13:26 +0000

Don’t forget to use the Collection Initializers for C# 3.0:
var list = new List { “String1″, “String2″, “String3″ };