Are there any practical uses of the TypedReference
struct that you would actually use in real code?
EDIT: The .Net framework uses them in overloads of Console.WriteLine
and String.Concat
which build an array from an __arglist
parameter and pass it to the normal params
overload. Why do these overloads exist?
Are there any practical uses of the TypedReference struct that you would actually use in real code?
Yes. I'd use them if I needed interoperability with C-style variadic methods.
Why do these overloads exist?
They exist for interoperability with callers who like to use C-style variadic methods.
This appears to be a very old question, but I'd like to add one more use-case: when you have a struct and want to set its variable through reflection, you would always operate on the boxed value and never change the original. This is useless:
TestFields fields = new TestFields { MaxValue = 1234 };
FieldInfo info = typeof(TestFields).GetField("MaxValue");
info.SetValue(fields, 4096);
// result: fields.MaxValue is still 1234!!
This can be remedied with implied boxing, but then you loose type safety. Instead, you can fix this with a TypedParameter
:
TestFields fields = new TestFields { MaxValue = 1234 };
FieldInfo info = fields.GetType().GetField("MaxValue");
TypedReference reference = __makeref(fields);
info.SetValueDirect(reference, 4096);
// result: fields.MaxValue is now indeed 4096!!
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