How to make 2 incompatible types, but with the same members, interchangeable?

Question

Yesterday 2 of the guys on our team came to me with an uncommon problem. We are using a third-party component in one of our winforms applications. All the code has already b

Answer 1

If you're using .Net 4 you can avoid having to do alot of this as the dynamic type can help with what you want. However if using .Net 2+ there is another (different way) of achieving this:

You can use a duck typing library like the one from Deft Flux to treat your third party classes as if they implemented an interface.

For example:

public interface ICommonInterface
{
    string Name { get; }
    void DoThirdPartyStuff();
}

//...in your code:
ThirdPartyClass1 classWeWishHadInterface = new ThirdPartyClass1()
ICommonInterface classWrappedAsInterface = DuckTyping.Cast(classWeWishHadInterface);

classWrappedAsInterface.DoThirdPartyStuff();

This avoids having to build derived wrapper classes manually for all those classes - and will work as long as the class has the same members as the interface