How do you return two values from a single method?

Question

When your in a situation where you need to return two things in a single method, what is the best approach?

I understand the philosophy that a method should do one t

Answer 1

I will usually opt for approach #4 as I prefer the clarity of knowing what the function produces or calculate is it's return value (rather than byref parameters). Also, it lends to a rather "functional" style in program flow.

The disadvantage of option #4 with generic tuple classes is it isn't much better than returning a collection (the only gain is type safety).

public IList CalculateStuffCollection(int arg1, int arg2)
public Tuple CalculateStuffType(int arg1, int arg2)

var resultCollection = CalculateStuffCollection(1,2);
var resultTuple = CalculateStuffTuple(1,2);

resultCollection[0]    // Was it index 0 or 1 I wanted? 
resultTuple.A          // Was it A or B I wanted?

I would like a language that allowed me to return an immutable tuple of named variables (similar to a dictionary, but immutable, typesafe and statically checked). But, sadly, such an option isn't available to me in the world of VB.NET, it may be elsewhere.

I dislike option #2 because it breaks that "functional" style and forces you back into a procedural world (when often I don't want to do that just to call a simple method like TryParse).