Most important things about C# generics… lesson learned [closed]

Answer 1

Don't know if they are most important, but I've learned the following:

Generics will only be instantiable via reflection if you don't know the frikkin type. In some cases you may need non-generic interfaces to use your generic classes in situations where the type is unknown.

I almost wrecked my head until I grocked that

public class Foo where T : Foo {
  public T CloneMe() ...
}

is perfectly valid code and allows your base class to expose methods and properties related to the specialized class...that ended up in a definition of a state machine along its states:

public abstract class Machine where S : State where M : Machine  {
    protected S state;
}

public abstract class State where S : State where M : Machine {
    protected M machine;
}

Generics can get a bit unwieldy. The other day I had this:

List>,Expression>>>

phew...