Essential C# 2.0

Chapter 11. Generics as your projects become more sophisticated, you will need a better way to reuse and customize existing software. To facilitate code reuse, especially the reuse of algorithms, C# includes a feature called generics. Just a...

C# without Generics I will begin the discussion of generics by examining a class that does not use generics. The class is System.Collections.Stack, and its purpose is to represent a collection of objects such that the last item to be added to th...

Introducing Generic Types Generics provide a facility for creating data structures that are specialized to handle specific types when declaring a variable. Programmers define these parameterized types so that each variable of a particular generi...

Constraints Generics support the ability to define constraints on type parameters. These constraints enforce the types to conform to various rules. Take, for example, the BinaryTree<T> class shown in Listing 11.18. Listing 11.18. Declaring ...

Generic Methods You already learned that it is relatively simple to add a generic method to a class when the class is a generic. You did this in the generic class examples so far, and it also works for static methods. Furthermore, you can use gene...

Generic Internals Given the discussions in earlier chapters about the prevalence of objects within the CLI type system, it is no surprise that generics are also objects. In fact, the type parameter on a generic class becomes metadata that the runt...

Summary Generics will significantly transform C# 1.0 coding style. In virtually all cases in which programmers used object within C# 1.0 code, generics would be a better choice in C# 2.0 to the extent that object should act as a flag for a possibl...