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

I would personally never use a Tuple as a return type because there is no indication of what the values represent. Tuples have some valuable uses because unlike objects they are value types and thus understand equality. Because of this I will use them as dictionary keys if I need a multipart key or as a key for a GroupBy clause if I want to group by multiple variables and don't want nested groupings (Who ever wants nested groupings?). To overcome the issue with extreme verbosity you can create them with a helper method. Keep in mind if you are frequently accessing members (through Item1, Item2, etc) then you should probably use a different construct such as a struct or an anonymous class.