I don’t know why I didn’t do this long ago, but I am done writing this:

var val = (SomeEnum)Enum.Parse(typeof(SomeEnum),”someString”);

I have typed this too many times and it annoys me.

I wrote a small extension method on the string type to make this better:

public static class StringExtensions
{
    public static T ToEnum<T>(this string @string)
    {
        return (T)Enum.Parse(typeof (T), @string);
    }
}

With this I can now write the previous line as:

var val = "someString".ToEnum<SomeEnum>()

It is a bit shorter and I think much more readable.