C# 4: Real-World Example of Dynamic Types

Question

I think I have my brain halfway wrapped around the Dynamic Types concept in C# 4, but can\'t for the life of me figure out a scenario where I\'d actually want to use it.

Answer 1

I think others have given some great answers so far so I just want to add this example by David Hanson. Hist post shows the most practical application I've found so far for dynamic types in C# where he uses them to create proxy objects. In this example he creates a proxy which allows raising of exceptions on WPF binding errors. I'm not sure if this could also be achieved in the case of WPF bindings by using CustomTypeDescriptors and property descriptor concepts in general but regardless I think the use of the new C# 4.0 dynamic type is a great demonstration of its capabilities.

Raising binding exceptions in WPF & Silverlight with .net 4.0 Dynamics

One other use that I can think of for Dynamic types is to create proxies that similarly can be plugged in as a DataContext in WPF or in other places where a generic object type is expected and reflection methods are normally used to interrogate the type. In these cases especially when building tests a dynamic type can be used which would then allow property accessors to be called and logged accordingly by the proxy object in a dynamic fashion without having to hardcode properties within a test-only class.