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Anonymous Type In .Net 3.0

In this article, we will discuss anonymous types. This feature is added in .net 3.0. To know about this feature, you should know what object initializers are. If you do not have an idea about this then please read that article first.

You are reading this article further so I assume that you are already familiar with the object initializers. Let us start a discussion about anonymous types.

Anonymous types mean creating an object without specifying its data type. It should be noted by the user that this is not the official definition of the anonymous type.

Let us work on an example for example if we have an entity "person" and we want to assign "name" and "age" to that entity then as per the anonymous type, we can implement like this: -

var person = new { Name = "Karan", Age = 29 };

In this code, we are declaring an object of type person and assign value to Name and Age.

To get the value you can use "person.Name" and "person.Age". So, if you are working on a Windows application then you can test by writing the following code: -

private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { 
    var person = new { 
        Name = "Karan", 
        Age = 29 
    }; 
    MessageBox.Show(person.Name); 
    MessageBox.Show(person.Age.ToString()); 
}

Internally when the C# compiler gets the request it converts the anonymous types into the following code: -

class __Anonymous1 { 
    private string name; 
    private int age; 
    public string Name { 
        get { 
            return name; 
        } 
        set { 
            name = value; 
        } 
    } 
    public int Age { 
        get { 
            return age; 
        } 
        set { 
            age = value; 
        } 
    } 
} 
__Anonymous1 p1 = new __Anonymous1(); 
p1.Name = "Karan"; 
pt.Age = 29

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Monday, January 25, 2010

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