I am having a really bad time with this one. For some reason, I can't
seem to remember how to implement this (elegantly) in c# ... so I
thought I would ask the community.

Basically, I have defined a generic.... and I want to expose a virtual
method on the generic that returns the same generic.

... ignoring the obvious stupidity below, what I am missing that would
allow for something like this? I am purposefully dumbing down my
example for the sake of brevity....

Also, the actual goal/purpose of the code isn't the issue here, it is
more of a language feature question. The example code below is just
that...... example code.

    public class TestGeneric<T>
    {
        List<T> _mylist = new List<T>;

        public virtual TestGeneric<T> CutInHalf()
        {
             // cut the list in half and return it to the caller
        }

        public virtual Add(T item)
        {
         _mylist.Add(item);
        }

    }

    public class TestClass
    {
        public string myGUID = System.Guid.NewGuid().ToString();
    }

    public class  TestClassHeap : TestGeneric<TestClass>
    {
    }

.... all the code above will compile nicely... now if I actually try
to use it somewhere, i will get type mismatch issues...

    TestClassHeap heap = new TestClassHeap();
    heap.Add(new TestClass());
    heap.Add(new TestClass());

    // this line fails to compile because the type returned by
TestGeneric::CutInHalf is different
    // than the actual defined type TestClassHeap... which is a
perfectly reasonable interpretation
    // by the compiler.
    TestClassHeap half = heap.CutInHalf();

What I was hoping to do is return from a method on the generic, and
instance of the DERIVED type (as shown in the usage example above).

I can 'hack it' and get it to work by doing this (ignore the syntactic
issues please, i am doing this on-the-fly... )

               public class TestGeneric<T, CT> where CT: new()
    {
        List<T> _mylist = new List<T>;

        public virtual CT CutInHalf()
        {
             // cut the list in half and return it to the caller
        }

        public virtual Add(T item)
        {
         _mylist.Add(item);
        }

    }

    public class TestClass
    {
        public string myGUID = System.Guid.NewGuid().ToString();
    }

    public class  TestClassHeap : TestGeneric<TestClass, TestClassHeap>
    {
    }

The definition above does what I want, but it is somewhat hackish, as
it requires me to pass in the class i am defining as a generic
parameter to the generic that the defined class is deriving from ...

Like I said, the hack works, but I was hoping for a more elegant
solution.... and my brain is deadlocked.

Thanks in advance!