Expert C# 5.0: with the .NET 4.5 Framework

CHAPTER 6

Enum

This chapter will discuss one of the nice features of the C# language: enumerated type or enum for short. I will show you how the enum type is defined in the .NET Framework, how you can get symbolic names and values from the enum, and how enum parses in C#.

Enum and .NET

Enum in C# is a type, which is a set of symbolic names and values (given by you or the C# compiler) pair. For example:

public enum Planets {     Sun = 0,     Earth, }

Or with the explicit type:

public enum Planets : int        /* int is the underlying type which C# compiler will use to set                                   * the values */ {                                 ...