ANOTHER UPDATE: This question was the subject of my blog in July 2013. Thanks for the great question! UPDATE: I’ve given this some more thought and I think the problem is that you don’t want inheritance at all. Rather, what you want is for all constraints that must be placed on a type parameter in … Read more
As you’ve found, you can’t do this. As a workaround I normally supply a delegate that can create objects of type T: public class A { public static void Method<T> (T a, Func<float[,], T> creator) { //…do something… } }
Since Enum Type implements IConvertible interface, a better implementation should be something like this: public T GetEnumFromString<T>(string value) where T : struct, IConvertible { if (!typeof(T).IsEnum) { throw new ArgumentException(“T must be an enumerated type”); } //… } This will still permit passing of value types implementing IConvertible. The chances are rare though.