Enum.Parse(), surely a neater way?

Question

Say I have an enum,

public enum Colours
{
    Red,
    Blue
}

The only way I can see of parsing them is doing something like:

Answer 1

No, there's no "no-throw" method for this (a la TryParse that some other classes have).

However, you could easily write your own so as to encapsulate the try-catch logic (or the IsDefined check) in one helper method so it doesn't pollute your app code:

public static object TryParse(Type enumType, string value, out bool success)
{
  success = Enum.IsDefined(enumType, value);
  if (success)
  {
    return Enum.Parse(enumType, value);
  }
  return null;
}