Question

I’ve got a generic dictionary Dictionary<string, T> that I would like to essentially make a Clone() of ..any suggestions.

Answer 1

Okay, the .NET 2.0 answers:

If you don’t need to clone the values, you can use the constructor overload to Dictionary which takes an existing IDictionary. (You can specify the comparer as the existing dictionary’s comparer, too.)

If you do need to clone the values, you can use something like this:

public static Dictionary<TKey, TValue> CloneDictionaryCloningValues<TKey, TValue>    (Dictionary<TKey, TValue> original) where TValue : ICloneable {     Dictionary<TKey, TValue> ret = new Dictionary<TKey, TValue>(original.Count,                                                             original.Comparer);     foreach (KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue> entry in original)     {         ret.Add(entry.Key, (TValue) entry.Value.Clone());     }     return ret; } 

That relies on TValue.Clone() being a suitably deep clone as well, of course.