I'm having a couple basic generics problems. Basically, I'm trying to identify

I'm having a couple basic generics problems. Basically, I'm trying to identify a piece of content by two indexes.

1) I need to store the content in the class, so I need to create a class variable, classTableCellContent, to store it in. Therefore I need to create one, requiring me to constrain the generic type "where ContentType : new()". However, when I attempt to consume this type with a string, e.g. TableCell<string>, it throws a compiler error "The type 'string' must have a public parameterless constructor in order to use it as a parameter blahblahblah..."

2) I need to accept input, so I have an add function. However, when I try to indicate that the third parameter is the same data type, i.e. ContentType, the compiler seems to believe that I'm creating a "new" data type with a poorly chosen name that hides the original data type declared in the class declaration. I'm sure this must be something stupid I'm missing. All I want to do is accept an input variable of the generic type in a function and store it in the class for later use.

Here's the code. I've even highlighted the two lines that seem to be throwing the errors.

Code:

public class TableCell<ContentType> where ContentType : new()
{
private int classRowIndex = 0;
private int classColumnIndex = 0;
private ContentType classTableCellContent = new ContentType();


/// <summary>
/// TableCell<ContentType>() - Constructors for creating a new TableCell
/// </summary>
public TableCell() {}
public TableCell(int inputRowIndex, int inputColumnIndex, ContentType inputTableCellContent)
{
addContent<ContentType>(inputRowIndex, inputColumnIndex, inputTableCellContent);
}


/// <summary>
/// void addContent<ContentType>(int inputRowIndex, int inputColumnIndex, ContentType inputTableCellContent) - accepts row and column indexesa dictionary and returns the XHTML to display all it's contents as a list
/// </summary>
public void addContent<ContentType>(int inputRowIndex, int inputColumnIndex, ContentType inputTableCellContent)
{
classRowIndex = inputRowIndex;
classColumnIndex = inputColumnIndex;
classTableCellContent = inputTableCellContent;
}
}