Accessing a generic collection from view model in html helper

Question

I'm attempting to write an html helper in which I want to iterate over a known typed property which is a generic list, and output the required HTML content. Here is an outline of how I have constructed the view model to ensure any view models comply with the helper;

Interface definition:

public Interface ITheViewModelInterface<T> where T : class
{
    IEnumerable<T> Items { get; set; }
}

Concrete abstract interface implementation (so that I can define default values) :

public abstract class TheConcreteViewModelImplementation<T> : IViewModelInterface<T> where T : class
{
    public virtual IEnumerable<T> Items { get; set; }
}

ViewModel:

public class TheViewModel : TheConcreteViewModelImplementation<MyListType>
{ 

}

What would be the helper definition such that I could access the correctly typed list of items in the base class? I'm not entirely sure I need a strongly typed helper in this instance, but how do I explicitly pass the items type in the helper call?

Answer 1

After some more research on this matter, I found this discussion which provides some answers (and a rather astounding statement from Microsoft!) to my question;

ASP.NET MVC 3 HtmlHelper Exception does not recognize ModelMetadata on inherited interface