Accelerated C# 2010

Chapter 11. Generics

Support for generics is one of the nicest features of C# and .NET. Generics allow you to create open-ended types that are converted into closed types at runtime. Each unique closed type is a unique type. Only closed types can be instantiated. When you declare a generic type, you specify a list of type parameters in the declaration for which type arguments are given to create closed types, as in the following example:

public class MyCollection<T>
{
    public MyCollection() {
    }

    private T[] storage;
}

In this case, I declared a generic type, MyCollection<T>, which treats the type within the collection as an unspecified type. In this example, the type parameter list consists of only one type, and it is described with syntax in which ...