Question

I’m having trouble understanding the dynamic keyword (used .net 2 up til recently).

Can someone please explain what it is for? Perhaps give a simple but real-world example, and explain in what situations in can be used, benefits and drawbacks, etc.

Answer 1

The proper use of dynamic occurs pretty rarely in practice because you only use it if there is no (convenient) type-safe way of doing the same.

For example:

1. ASP.NET MVC ViewBag (generally inferior to custom ViewModel classes)
2. Access to Javascript objects from C#
3. Some rare cases where you know an object has a certain method but the method is not available statically. Think of database entities which all have an ID property by convention

Those are valid use cases but they are not that common.