Section 26.7. Wrap-Up

26.7. Wrap-Up

This chapter introduced the .NET Framework collection classes. You learned the hierarchy of interfaces that many of the collection classes implement. You saw how to use class Array to perform array manipulations. You learned that the System.Collections and System.Collections.Generic namespaces contain many non-generic and generic collection classes, respectively. We presented the non-generic classes ArrayList, Stack and Hashtable as well as the generic classes SortedDictionary and LinkedList. In doing so, we discussed data structures in greater depth. We discussed dynamically expanding collections, hashing schemes, and two implementations of a dictionary. You saw the advantages of generic collections over their non-generic counterparts.

You also learned how to use enumerators to traverse these data structures and obtain their contents. We demonstrated the For Each statement with many of the classes of the FCL, and explained that this works by using enumerators "behind the scenes" to traverse the collections. Finally, we discussed some of the issues that you should consider when using collections in multithreaded applications.