Using Data Type Alias in .Net

Introduction

Data type aliasing allows us to use an alias of a data type instead of actual data type name.

For example if we want to use System.Int32 in our code but we may want to change it to Int64 or Int16 in future. So instead of using Int32 in our code and then replacing the whole code with Int64 later, what we can do is, we can declare an alias for Int32 and use it, later on when we want to use Int64 we can just change the alias declaration and its done.

Using in code

//C#:
using MyType = System.Int32; //define alias MyType for System.Int32

//Now we can use the alias MyType anywhere in our code instead of actual System.In32 like below
MyType myNumber=12; 
Console.WriteLine(myNumber.ToString()); 

//If we want to change to System.Int64, We will simply change the alias, that’s it.
using MyType = System.Int64; 

'To declare alias in VB.net:
Imports MyType=System.Int32 'defines alias for System.Int32

Points of Interest

This is really cool to use when another team is working on some class who’s' final name we don't know, so for the time we can create a dummy class and use an alias throughout the code and later we can replace the alias declaration with actual class name.