Collections

Abstract

Collections occur naturally in most problem domains—a company has a group of employees, an operating system has a collection of processes competing for processor time, and a graphics package has a number of shapes that exist on a drawing layer. For simple collections, System.Array can be effectively used to represent data groups; but for collections with more complex needs like data mapping, addition, and insertion, more advanced types are required, and the System.Collections and System.Collections.Specialized namespaces provide a number of types offering these abilities. Choosing the correct collection is important for achieving elegant and efficient code. The different collection types have varying abilities to perform certain tasks, and also have very different performance characteristics for certain activities.