It seems that enums might be the neglected step-child when it comes to Generics and Extensions.  I've tried defining generics that are constrained to enums.  No luck.  I faced much frustration trying to get my generic methods to work.  I finally came up with a method that meets my need.  But, I had to add a little bit of run-time type checking.

Instead of repeating Enum.Parse throughout my code, I wanted to create a simple generic extension method that would do it for me.

I just discovered that my extension is practically identical to Kirill Osenkov's.  Check out his discussion here.

public static TResult ConvertTo<TResult>( this string source )
{
    if( !typeof( TResult ).IsEnum )
    {
        throw new NotSupportedException( "TResult must be an Enum" );
    }
    return (TResult)Enum.Parse( typeof( TResult ), source );
}

If the compile time constraint were allowed, I would prefer this

public static TResult ConvertTo<TResult>( this string source ) where TResult : Enum
{
    return (TResult)Enum.Parse( typeof( TResult ), source );
}

The usage is something like this.

MyObject.ClosingStatus = input.ConvertTo<ClosingStatus>();
//or
reader.GetString( 2 ).ConvertTo<ClosingStatus>();

After I came up with this, I searched to find out if anyone else out there found a better way to resolve the limitations surrounding enums.  I found Christopher Bennage's post on Enum<T> and I like it quite a bit.