Question

I’m in a situation where I need to return an object of an anonymous type from a method, is it a good idea to use dynamic as a return type? what considerations to take?

public dynamic MyMethod()
{
    // process and return the object of an anonymous type
}

Answer 1

Yes it has sense If you “guarantee” that you’ll always return an object with some characteristics , with an Id for example (ignoring that perhaps it would be better to use an Interface)

public dynamic MyMethod()
{
    var temp = new ExpandoObject();
    temp.Id = 5;
    return temp;
}

Console.WriteLine(MyMethod().Id);

So if you guarantee that all your objects can Turn Left-Right but you don’t guarantee if they are airplanes, cars, motos, boats. (so it’s good if you are doing Duck typing When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.)

Note that if you then need to reflect on your objects, it can become ugly: How do I reflect over the members of dynamic object?