.net - C#: Restricting Types in method parameters (not generic parameters)

Question

I'd like to code a function like the following

public void Foo(System.Type t where t : MyClass)
{ ... }

In other words, the argument type is System.Type, and I want to restrict the allowed Types to those that derive from MyClass.

Is there any way to specify this syntactically, or does t have to be checked at runtime?

Answer 1

If your method has to take a Type type as it's argument, there's no way to do this. If you have flexibility with the method call you could do:

public void Foo(MyClass myClass)

and the get the Type by calling .GetType().

To expand a little. System.Type is the type of the argument, so there's no way to further specify what should be passed. Just as a method that takes an integer between 1 and 10, must take an int and then do runtime checking that the limits were properly adhered to.