Question

I’m in the immediate window in Visual Studio. There’s a variable p. How can I deduce the type of the variable p?

I tried p.GetType() but that returns the type of object p. In my case, this is a very specific type (eg. sometimes ChessPlayer, sometimes TennisPlayer). I’d like to know the type of the variable, ie. the type that determines what methods are available on the variable p.

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Edit: I think this is a reasonable thing to want to do. I am trying to inspect the variable p but I don’t know it is! Normally in Visual Studio I just hover the mouse on the variable and it tells me its type, or I type . and the autocomplete lists its methods. However none of that works in the immediate window, all I have is this variable p I don’t know what it is or what I can do with it 🙁

Answer 1

Surprised this was so difficult, in the end I wrote this method, which seems to give the right answer.

public static class Extensions
{
    public static Type GetVariableType<T>(this T instance)
    {
        return typeof(T);
    }
}

Example usage:

void Main()
{
    IList x = new List<int>{};
    x.GetVariableType().Dump();
}

Prints System.Collections.IList