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

If your only goal is to add the GetBytes method to these types, isn't it a much nicer solution to add them as extension methods like so:

public static class MyExtensions {
    public static byte[] GetBytes(this int value) {
        return BitConverter.GetBytes(value) ;
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(this uint value) {
        return BitConverter.GetBytes(value) ;
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(this double value) {
        return BitConverter.GetBytes(value) ;
    }
    public static byte[] GetBytes(this float value) {
        return BitConverter.GetBytes(value) ;
    }
}

If you really need you generic class for other purposes, just do the dirty "double typecast" like Eric mentioned where you typecast value to object first.