Is there a trick in creating a generic list of anonymous type?

Question

Sometimes i need to use a Tuple, for example i have list of tanks and their target tanks (they chase after them or something like that ) :

List<Tuple<Tank,Tank>> mylist = new List<Tuple<Tank,Tank>>(); 

and then when i iterate over the list i access them by

mylist[i].item1 ... mylist[i].item2 ... 

It's very confusing and i always forget what is item1 and what is item2, if i could access them by :

mylist[i].AttackingTank... mylist[i].TargetTank... 

It would be much clearer, is there a way to do it without defining a class:

MyTuple { public Tank AttackingTank; public Tank TargetTank; } 

I want to avoid defining this class because then i would have to define many different classes in different scenarios, can i do some "trick" and make this anonymous.

Something like :

var k = new {Name = "me", phone = 123}; mylist.Add(k); 

The problem of course that i don't have a type to pass to the List when i define it

Answer 1

You can create an empty list for anonymous types and then use it, enjoying full intellisense and compile-time checks:

var list = Enumerable.Empty<object>()              .Select(r => new {A = 0, B = 0}) // prototype of anonymous type              .ToList();  list.Add(new { A = 4, B = 5 }); // adding actual values  Console.Write(list[0].A); 

Answer 2

You could use a List<dynamic>.

 var myList = new List<dynamic>();  myList.Add(new {Tank = new Tank(), AttackingTank = new Tank()});   Console.WriteLine("AttackingTank: {0}", myList[0].AttackingTank);