Question

I’ve been developing .net console applications using C# and have always just dictated what order parameters must be inserted in so that args[0] is always start date and args[1] is always end date, for example.

however I would like to move over to using named parameters so that any combination of parameters can be sent in any order, such as the typical “-sd” would prefix a start date.

I know I could parse through the args[] looking for “-” and then read the name and look the next position for the accompanying value, but before doing that wanted to see if there was any kind of baked in handling for this rather standard practice.

is there something like this out there already that could do as such:

DateTime startDate = (DateTime)((ConsoleParameters)args[])["sd"]

I’m using C# and .Net 4

Answer 1

There is nothing built into the core framework.

A lot of people think NDesk.Options is useful for this sort of thing. Check out this example (taken directly from the provided link):

string data = null;
bool help   = false;
int verbose = 0;

var p = new OptionSet () {
    { "file=",      v => data = v },
    { "v|verbose",  v => { ++verbose } },
    { "h|?|help",   v => help = v != null },
};
List<string> extra = p.Parse (args);