Summary

This chapter covered most of the interfaces and classes that comprise the System.Collections and System.Collection.Specialized namespaces. We examined the standard interfaces such as IEnumerable , IEnumerator , and ICollection , and have discussed how these interfaces work together to provide a consistent way of creating and using collections. We've not covered every single collection class or method in this chapter, but hopefully have given you a pretty good feel for the type of functionality available.

This chapter looked at:

• How to use the standard collection classes such as ArrayList , Hashtable , Queue , and Stack .

• How to derive from collection base classes to quickly implement your own collection classes that restrict contained types.

• How to create strongly typed collections that make using collections more intuitive for specific applications, which leads to more readable code thanks to fewer casts.

The next chapter looks at the classes provided by the .NET Framework class library for working with text files, sockets, and regular expressions.