Collections

Abstract

In this chapter, we took a tour of the generic collection classes, looking at lists, dictionaries, sets, queues, and stacks. These are classes that you will use day-in, day-out in your projects. You’ll probably use List<T> most often to begin with, because it can be used as a direct replacement for an array, which most programmers are already comfortable with. But the other collection classes are worth your attention also, so I suggest you take the time to understand them all.

We also looked at how to apply some collection-like features to arrays using the System.Array class. This is a very useful feature that doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves. Collections are a complement to arrays, not a replacement, and being able to treat an array as you would a collection can be a great time-saver.

Finally, we looked at how to create read-only collections and touched upon the legacy collections that have been part of the .NET class library since before C# supported generics. I strongly recommend that you stick to the generic classes, which have more features and where strong typing will help eliminate runtime exceptions.