Making Types Safely Reusable with Generics
Explore how generics in C# help create safer and more efficient reusable types by replacing weakly typed collections. Understand generic collections like Dictionary that enforce type safety, reduce errors, and improve performance when working with multiple data values.
We'll cover the following...
In 2005, with C# 2.0 and .NET Framework 2.0, Microsoft introduced a feature named generics, enabling our types to be more safely reusable and efficient. It allows a programmer to pass types as parameters, like how we can pass objects as parameters.
Working with non-generic types
First, let’s look at an example of working with a non-generic type so that we can understand the problem that generics are designed to solve, such as weakly typed parameters and values, and performance problems caused by using System.Object.
System.Collections.Hashtable can be used to store multiple values, each with a unique key that can later be used to quickly look up its value. Both the key and value can be any object because they are declared as System.Object ...