Every couple of years, I tend to write the same variation of an enum helper that reads metadata from an enumeration using reflection. Almost any .NET developer with a few years of experience has done the same. The implementation uses Generics to work for any enum defined in my solution, as there is typically more than one described in a typical .NET solution. Historically, generics and enums didn’t work well because of the limitations of generics when dealing with this particular type, but to my surprise, they do now!
In this post, we’ll explore how to write the helper method I’m describing while ensuring the generic constraints stop us from passing in arguments other than enums.
