C# generics: cast generic type to value type

Question

I have a generic class which saves value for the specified type T. The value can be an int, uint, double or float. Now I want to get the bytes of the value to encode it into an specific protocol. Therefore I want to use the method BitConverter.GetBytes() but unfortunately Bitconverter does not support generic types or undefined objects. That is why I want to cast the value and call the specific overload of GetBytes(). My Question: How can I cast a generic value to int, double or float? This doesn't work:

public class GenericClass<T>
    where T : struct
{
    T _value;

    public void SetValue(T value)
    {
        this._value = value;
    }

    public byte[] GetBytes()
    {
        //int x = (int)this._value;
        if(typeof(T) == typeof(int))
        {
            return BitConverter.GetBytes((int)this._value);
        }
        else if (typeof(T) == typeof(double))
        {
            return BitConverter.GetBytes((double)this._value);
        }
        else if (typeof(T) == typeof(float))
        {
            return BitConverter.GetBytes((float)this._value);
        }
    }
}

Is there a possibility to cast an generic value? Or is there another way to get the bytes?

Answer 1

If your only goal is to add the GetBytes method to these types, isn't it a much nicer solution to add them as extension methods like so:

public static class MyExtensions {
    public static byte[] GetBytes(this int value) {
        return BitConverter.GetBytes(value) ;
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(this uint value) {
        return BitConverter.GetBytes(value) ;
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(this double value) {
        return BitConverter.GetBytes(value) ;
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(this float value) {
        return BitConverter.GetBytes(value) ;
    }
}

If you really need you generic class for other purposes, just do the dirty "double typecast" like Eric mentioned where you typecast value to object first.