Why we have used Generic collection

Hi,

        Generics gives you the ability to create a generic methods or a generic type by defining a placeholder for method arguments or type definitions, which are specified at the time of invoking the generic method or creating the generic type.


This has been Referred from Articles:

http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/Ashush/generics-in-C-Sharp-part-i/

http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/Ashush/generics-in-C-Sharp-part-ii/

Hi Manish,

Using generic collections is generally recommended, because you gain the immediate benefit of type safety without having to derive from a base collection type and implement type-specific members. In addition, generic collection types generally perform better than the corresponding nongeneric collection types (and better than types derived from nongeneric base collection types) when the collection elements are value types, because with generics there is no need to box the elements.


Refer

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms172181%28v=vs.80%29.aspx

http://www.csharp-station.com/Tutorials/Lesson20.aspx

http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/Ashush/generics-in-C-Sharp-part-i/default.aspx


Thanks

The advantage of using generic collections is that they are strongly typed.

Take List for example. This represents a strongly typed collection of objects of type T, where T can be any class or struct. Unlike an array, it can increase its size dynamically as new objects are added to the collection. You can instantiate the collection, add an element and retrieve it like this:

List list = new List();
list.Add(3);
int value = list[0]; // value is set to 3

Before generics were introduced in .NET 2.0, one had to use the ArrayList instead. This was weakly typed (everything was stored internally as of type Object) and, worse still, when structs were added they had to be boxed on the heap (a slow process) and then unboxed when they were retrieved. The corresponding code for the ArrayList would have been:

ArrayList aList = new ArrayList();
aList.Add(3); // 3 has to be boxed so it can be stored as an Object
int value = (int)aList[0]; // value is set to 3 which has to be unboxed first using a cast