Utility to Get Feature Scope in SPFeatureReceiver

During development, I might change my feature’s scope in the feature.xml definition.  To make sure this never bites me, I always check in my SPFeatureReceiver methods to make sure I am casting the feature’s parent to the right object.  If not, I throw an SPException so the error gets displayed to the browser window.  I find myself repeating this for every feature I write, so here is a snippet I use to keep it DRY.

    internal static class FeatureReceiverUtil
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Returns an object representing the scope of the feature, and throws an SPException 
        /// if the scope is unexpected
        /// </summary>
        /// <typeparam name="T">should be SPWeb, SPSite, SPWebApplication, or SPFarm</typeparam>
        /// <param name="properties">the properties from the feature receiver event</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        internal static T GetScope<T>(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) where T : class
        {
            var scope = properties.Feature.Parent as T;
            if (null == scope) throw new SPException(
                string.Format(
                    "Feature {0} ({1}) expected to be at the {2} scope but was not",
                    properties.Definition.DisplayName,
                    properties.Definition.Id,
                    typeof(T).Name
                ));
            return scope;
        }
    }

Usage is:

SPWeb web = FeatureReceiverUtil.GetScope<SPWeb>(properties);