Is Using .NET 4.0 Tuples in my C# Code a Poor Design Decision?

Question

With the addition of the Tuple class in .net 4, I have been trying to decide if using them in my design is a bad choice or not. The way I see it, a Tuple can be a shortcut

Answer 1

IMO these "tuples" are basically all public access anonymous struct types with unnamed members.

The only place I would use tuple is when you need to quickly blob together some data, in a very limited scope. The semantics of the data should be are obvious, so the code is not hard to read. So using a tuple (int,int) for (row,col) seems reasonable. But I'm hard pressed to find an advantage over a struct with named members (so no mistakes are made and row/column aren't accidentally interchanged)

If you're sending data back to the caller, or accepting data from a caller, you really should be using a struct with named members.

Take a simple example:

struct Color{ float r,g,b,a ; }
public void setColor( Color color )
{
}

The tuple version

public void setColor( Tuple color )
{
  // why?
}

I don't see any advantage to using tuple in the place of a struct with named members. Using unnamed members is a step backward for the readability and understandability of your code.

Tuple strikes me as a lazy way to avoid creating a struct with actual named members. Overuse of tuple, where you really feel you/or someone else encountering your code would need named members is A Bad Thing™ if I ever saw one.