A Note about Enums (Scott Wisniewski)

MSDN Blog Postings » A Note about Enums (Scott Wisniewski)

MSDN Blog Postings » A Note about Enums (Scott Wisniewski) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:14:32 GMT

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re: A Note about Enums (Scott Wisniewski)

Kim Major — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 12:17:17 GMT

I believe I got the context of the question, but I feel that the answer slightly misses the point. While technically correct, the problem in the question would IMHO better be solved by following a few simple principles leading to better code in the first place.

Extract what varies. In this case the variation is the DoSomethingXXX().

If the base class had a reference to an IDoSomething.

eg. Dim MyDoer as IDoSomething

then instead of switching on the enum he could just call MyDoer.DoSomething where the MyDoer is a concrete implementation of whatever action needs to be carried out.

This would also shield the base class from changes when a DoSomethingXYZ comes around.

re: A Note about Enums (Scott Wisniewski)

Michael Feld — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 12:36:40 GMT

While I can see why you can't inherit from enum types, what I'd really like do is constrain on enum types, such as:

Public Class Foo(Of T As System.Enum)

...

End Class

This would ensure that T will be supported in the System.Enum.GetNames() method, for example. Plus, you can always cast it to an Object.