[jsgo]

Generics with Reflection was the first gut check I experienced while working after completing college and getting an ASP.NET job. Like 2-3 weeks into said job.

Had to do an application that dealt with 4-5 forms (can't remember). Like 300 fields on the bigger ones, smaller ones 50ish. I started out on one that was mid-200. I'm coding the way I was taught in school: object set object properties based on txtWhatever.Text. Like 240ish times. I can't remember how many lines of code were in this code behind, but it was substantial.

I turn it in, it works. Go me, let me go on to the next one. The senior guy on the team does one of the smaller forms. But he uses generics and reflection to basically iterate over all of the fields on the form and sets them to the ephemeral properties on this generic object in like 8-9 lines of code. Then there was the rendering code that was vaguely similar.

Added bonus: 99% of his code behind could be copy and pasted over to the newer forms and handle all of the work related to getting/setting form values. After the code proved to work for a few weeks, replaced the massive code behind with call to his code (passing in the form object and the generic to be set and used later) with the same result and one area to manage code and it isn't an insanely large code behind file (got better with not one filing everything in time too).

Not saying generics and/or reflection are a silver bullet (I don't feel they are. Rarely so do they end up being the thing I go for), but it was definitely eye opening that straying from "see spot run" code could be advantageous. And that I wasn't "good to go" already.