Is it Possible to Make a Generic Control in .Net 3.5?

Question

I\'ve got the following Generic usercontrol declared:

public partial class MessageBase : UserControl
    {
        protected T myEntry;
        publ         


        

Answer 1

The .NET framework supports them, but as Vilx mantions, the designers simply do not - and any of the xml/markup-based platforms (xaml (wpf) or ASP.NET) will not like generics at all. So the best advice is: don't use them.

A common compromise is to have a Type property (or an object template-property upon which you call GetType()), and simply cast etc inside the control. Likewise, such usage will commonly make use of things like Activator.CreateInstance, and TypeDescriptor (for metadata lookup etc).