Question

I just noticed that you can do this in C#:

Unit myUnit = 5; 

instead of having to do this:

Unit myUnit = new Unit(5); 

Does anyone know how I can achieve this with my own structs? I had a look at the Unit struct with reflector and noticed the TypeConverter attribute was being used, but after I created a custom TypeConverter for my struct I still couldn’t get the compiler to allow this convenient syntax.

Answer 1

You need to provide an implicit conversion operator from int to Unit, like so:

    public struct Unit     {   // the conversion operator...         public static implicit operator Unit(int value)         {             return new Unit(value);         }         // the boring stuff...         private readonly int value;         public int Value { get { return value; } }         public Unit(int value) { this.value = value; }     }