Let’s say you have a poco and you want to list all its properties whith their values for debug purpose (or other purposes : logs, …)

You can write something like this :

string porperties = "property1 : " + this.property1;
porperties+="property : " + this.property2;
// ..
porperties+="propertyn : " + this.propertyn;

but it’s long and painful, plus you can forget some properties

The reflection can help us here :

string porperties = "";
 foreach (System.Reflection.PropertyInfo f in this.GetType().GetProperties())
 {
porperties += f.Name + " : " + f.GetValue(this, null) + Environment.NewLine;
 }

And if you want to be a bit clever, you create a base object and redefine the ‘ToString() method like this:

public class POCOBase
{
public override string ToString()
{
string ret = "";
foreach (System.Reflection.PropertyInfo f in this.GetType().GetProperties())
{
ret += f.Name + " : " + f.GetValue(this, null) + Environment.NewLine;
  }
  return ret;
 }
}

Then just inherit from POCOBase and call the ToString() method

The output should be something like this :

AccountID : 10
ExternalREF : 090xfe
FIRSTNAME : USER 1
LASTNAME : TEST
PHONE : 00044440000
RegisterDate : 30/09/2009 16:20:02
Remark :

I think it’s quick, easy and useful

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