C#/.Net Generic constraints

Hi

Despite having no doubt about the usefulness of type constraints in C# generics (this is a key feature to help avoiding bugs when writing generic code in C#) I always had  the impression that it should be able to express more constraints than what the C# language / compiler exposes.

Well, some time ago this blog entry called my attention on my RSS reader and motivated me to go and scan the .Net specification (more specifically § II.10.1.7 in the CLI Metadata Definition and Semantics document which can be downloaded from here) and to my surprise I found out that in addition to the valid C# generic constraints CLI also support constraining a generic argument to delegates, arrays and even enums! That is nice.

Next question is: does the C# compiler abides by these rules when consuming assemblies?

To answer this question I wrote a small class library (in C#) that exposes some generic types and manually (ildasm/ilasm) added each of these constraints. After that I created one application (C#) that uses this library and confirmed that C# compiler does respect these constraints (at least in VS 2010 which uses CSC 4.0.30319.1). Bellow you can see the result of trying to use these generic types with incompatible types:

Generic parameter 'E' was constrained to enums

Generic parameter 'A' was constrained to arrays. 

You can download the sample application from here.

The bottom line:  Generic constrains in .Net  are more useful than what you may be lead to believe ;)

As always, don't be shy! Let me know what you think.

Hope you find this useful.