Question

**Preface I’m very new to generics. I have a class I created called Geno. My Peno class simply contains a string Name property. I’m wondering why I cannot call T.Name from within a method on this class. How would I access the properties on T? Any good resources on how this works?

public class Geno<T> where T : Peno
{

}

public string GetName()
{
   return T.Name;
}

Answer 1

Is your Name property an instance property or a static property? If it’s a static property, you don’t get polymorphism anyway – you could just call Peno.Name.

If it’s an instance property, you need an instance on which to call it. For example:

public class Geno<T> where T : Peno
{
    private readonly T value;

    public Geno(T value)
    {
        this.value = value;
    }

    public string GetName()
    {
       return value.Name;
    }    
}

If this doesn’t help, please give a more complete example of what you’re trying to do.