Collection of generic types

Question

If I have a generic class:

public class MyClass 
{
  public T Value;
}

I want to instantiate several items such as...

Answer 1

IList

There is no way to define a generic collection that can accept any flavor of your generic class... ie IList. Generic classes are only a short cut for the developer to save on writing a bunch of repetitive code but at compile time each flavor of the generic class is translated into a concrete. i.e. if you have MyClass, MyClass, MyClass then the compiler will generate 3 seperate and distinct classes. The only way to do what you want is to have an interface for your generic.

public interface IMyGeneric {
    Type MyType { get; set;}    
}

class MyGeneric : IMyGeneric {

    public MyGeneric() {
        MyType = typeof(T);
    }

    public Type MyType {
        get; set;
    }
}

and then you can say

IList list = new List();
list.add(new MyGeneric());
list.add(new MyGeneric());