properties - Dynamically set the property name of a C# anonymous type

Question

Is there any way to dynamically set the property name of an anonymous type?

Normally we'd do like this:

var anon = new { name = "Kayes" };

Now I'd like to set the name (or identifier) of the property dynamically, so that this name can come from an XML file or a database.

---

Thanks guys for your answers. No, my need is definitely not worth all the tedious alternatives. I just wanted to make my code comply with an existing library that was developed by my team lead. But we decided to update the library to support Dictionary types so that it can easily be solved.

Pete, I'm really excited to learn about dynamic types in .NET 4.0

Thanks.

Answer 1

That is not possible because even though the type is anonymous, it is not a dynamic type. It is still a static type, and properties about it must be known at compile time.

You might want to check out the .NET 4.0 "dynamic" keyword for generating true dynamic classes.