Interesting Clipboard Functionality

Last week’s blog post was an excerpt from my .Net Tips column in the April 2008 Issue of the Universal Thread Magazine. Well, that was such a good issue for Tips, that I'm going to post another one from the same issue. I hope no one minds! ;0)

Did you ever need to copy an instantiated class to the clipboard, retreive it and access a property or method on it? Well, here's how to do it:

Clipboard.SetData("MyClassFormat", new MyClass("42"));
if (Clipboard.ContainsData("MyClassFormat"))
{
    MyClass o = Clipboard.GetData("MyClassFormat") as MyClass;
    if (o != null)
    {
        // do stuff here, such as execute a method
        // o.MyMethod();
        // or set a property
        // o.MyProperty = "xyz";
    }
}
else
{
    MessageBox.Show("Ain't nothing there!!");
}

There's only one gotcha and that is that your class must have the [Serializable] attribute.

Thanks to Einar Kvandahl in Message #1135004 on the Universal Thread.