Why we need to use Tuples?

Question

Why we need to use Tuples instead of we can create class with strongly typed properties etc.. I think its good in using with huge projects that having lots of transactions to n fro. Yet don't understood why its introduced in C# 4.0

Vulpes · Answer

There are three main uses of tuples: 1. To enable methods to return more than one value without the need for 'ref' or 'out' parameters (I used them in my article about solving quadratic equations a while back). 2. As an alternative to anonymous types where you want to return multiple values from a LINQ query and then pass them as parameters to other methods or return them from the current method. Neither of these things are possible with anonymous types because return and parameter types can't be anonymous. You can also use tuples to define fields which you can't do with anonymous types. However a drawback of tuples is that you can't give names to the individual elements - you can only access them using the Item1 Item2 etc. syntax. 3. If you're doing any interop with a functional language such as F# which uses tuples extensively. As you rightly say you can define your own class with named properties etc instead of using a tuple so they're really just a convenience where you don't really want the overhead of doing this in a particular case. Tuples are immutable and I was surprised when the smaller ones were defined as classes rather than structs. However I remember reading somewhere that they tried it both ways and found that there was little performance difference so they decided to use classes for all sizes of tuples in the interests of consistency.

Mahesh Chand · Answer

And .. it sounds cool!

Vulpes · Answer

If you or anyone else is interested I've found what I remembered reading about why Tuples were implemented as classes rather than structs which was this article in MSDN magazine ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd942829.aspx ).