I don’t mean dynamic casting in the sense of casting a lower interface or base class to a more derived class, I mean taking an interface definition that I’ve created, and then dynamically casting to that interface a different object NOT derived from that interface but supporting all the calls.
For example,
interface IMyInterface
{
bool Visible
{
get;
}
}
TextBox myTextBox = new TextBox();
IMyInterface i = (dynamic<IMyInterface>)myTextBox;
This could be achieved at compile time for known types, and runtime for instances declared with dynamic. The interface definition is known, as is the type (in this example) so the compiler can determine if the object supports the calls defined by the interface and perform some magic for us to have the cast.
My guess is that this is not supported in C#4 (I was unable to find a reference to it), but I’d like to know for sure. And if it isn’t, I’d like to discuss if it should be included in a future variant of the language or not, and the reasons for and against. To me, it seems like a nice addition to enable greater polymorphism in code without having to create whole new types to wrap existing framework types.
Update
Lest someone accuse me of plagiarism, I was not aware of Jon Skeet having already proposed this. However, nice to know we thought of exceedingly similar syntax, which suggests it might be intuitive at least. Meanwhile, “have an original idea” remains on my bucket list for another day.
I think Jon Skeet has had such a proposal (http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/archive/2008/10/30/c-4-0-dynamic-lt-t-gt.aspx), but so far, I haven’t heard that C# 4.0 is going to have it.