Start networking and exchanging professional insights

Register now or log in to join your professional community.

Follow

What are the collections and what are various types of collections in .NET?

user-image
Question added by Muhammed Effat Ahmed Afifi , Project Leader [Microsoft Business Unit] , Wipro Arabia Limited
Date Posted: 2013/04/15
Panneer selvam xavier
by Panneer selvam xavier , Supply Chain Analyst / Trainer , Infonet

These aren't all lists, although they're all collections.
Here's a quick summary.
Non-generic collections (API is in terms of object.
Values types are boxed.
These are mostly in the System.Collections namespace: ArrayList: A list of items, backed by an array.
Fast random read/write access.
Fast add to the tail end, if the buffer doesn't need resizing.
Hashtable: Map from key to value.
Keys are unique, values don't have to be.
Uses the GetHashCode method to achieve near O(1) read/write access (aside from nasty cases where all items have the same hash, or the backing store needs rebuilding).
Iterating over the key/value pairs gives an unpredictable order.
(Well, effectively unpredictable.) SortedList: Like a Hashtable, but the entries are always returned in sorted-by-key order.
Stored as a list of key/value pairs.
Stack: Last-in-first-out collection Queue: First-in-first-out collection Array: Fixed-size O(1) random-access; non-generic, but has strongly typed forms as well Generic collections.
(Strongly-typed API, will not box value types (assuming suitable T).
These are mostly in the System.Collections.Generic namespace: List: Like ArrayList Dictionary: like Hashtable SortedList: like SortedList SortedDictionary: like SortedList, but stored as a tree of key/value pairs which gives better performance in many situations.
See docs for more detail.
LinkedList: Doubly linked list (fast access to head and tail) Stack: Like Stack Queue: Like Queue ReadOnlyCollection: Like List but giving a read-only view Possibly the most important collection interface is IEnumerable (and IEnumerable).
This represents a sequence of items much like a Stream represents a sequence of bytes.
There is no random access, just forward-reading.
LINQ to Objects is based on this, and pretty much all collection types implement it.

More Questions Like This

Do you need help in adding the right keywords to your CV? Let our CV writing experts help you.