Question

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Really impossible to use return type overloading?

Is there a way to take the same method and overload its return type? Like I did in the code below. I tried this but it says there is ambiguity between the two.

//supporting methods
private AutoResetEvent ReturnData = new AutoResetEvent(false);
public void PostMessage(string msg)
{ this.Message = msg; this.ReturnData.Set(); }
private string Message;
//a return value overload
public string GetMessage()
{
    this.ReturnData.WaitOne();
    return this.Message;
}
public byte[] GetMessage(){
    this.ReturnData.WaitOne();
    return encoder.GetBytes(Message);
}

Answer 1

You can’t overload by return type in C#.

When something similar needs to be done in the .NET framework they usually change the method name to include the name of the return type.

Example: BinaryReader

double ReadDouble() { ... }
int ReadInt32() { ... }

Example: SQLDataReader

double GetDouble(int i) { ... }
int GetInt32(int i) { ... }
etc...

In your case you could for example use GetMessageString and GetMessageBytes.