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

Answer 1

Well, it strikes me that the type really isn't properly generic to start with: it can only be one of a few types, and you can't express that constraint.

Then you want to call a different overload of GetBytes based on the type of T. Generics doesn't work well for that sort of thing. You could use dynamic typing to achieve it, in .NET 4 and above:

public byte[] GetBytes()
{
    return BitConverter.GetBytes((dynamic) _value);
}

... but again this doesn't really feel like a nice design.