Wednesday Tip: C# Type aliases

Ever written code that looks quite like this?

Dictionary<string, KeyValuePair<string, string>> cache = new Dictionary<string, KeyValuePair<string,string>();

I have. Ugly and noisy isn't it! OK you could make it slightly less noisy by using var

var cache = new Dictionary<string, KeyValuePair<string,string>();

Or I suppose you could ahead and create yet another random type to abstract the implementation out of the way but thats just too much work for something internal to a class.

Turns out you can make use of alises. I've always known about using alises for namespaces to either resolve possible type conflicts or to make code a bit more understandable

using CoreWeb = System.Web
...
var x = new CoreWeb.Request()

So this works with namespaces AND types.

using Cache = Dictionary<string, KeyValuePair<string,string>();

This allows us to make the declaration above in a much nicer manner,

Cache cache = new Cache();

OK so there are way to many uses of the word cache there but you get the gist. Handy to know. Never knew this until today #youlearnsomethingneweveryday