Question

I’ve been doing c# for a long time, and have never come across an easy way to just new up a hash.

I’ve recently become acquainted with the ruby syntax of hashes and wonder, does anyone know of a simple way to declare a hash as a literal, without doing all the add calls.

{ 'whatever' => {i => 1}; 'and then something else' => {j => 2}}; 

Answer 1

If you’re using C# 3.0 (.NET 3.5) then you can use collection initializers. They’re not quite as terse as in Ruby but still an improvement.

This example is based on the MSDN Example

var students = new Dictionary<int, StudentName>() {     { 111, new StudentName {FirstName='Sachin', LastName='Karnik', ID=211}},     { 112, new StudentName {FirstName='Dina', LastName='Salimzianova', ID=317, }},     { 113, new StudentName {FirstName='Andy', LastName='Ruth', ID=198, }} };