Application Development Using Visual Basic® and .NET

Collections

The .NET Framework class library provides an extensive set of classes for working with collections of objects. These classes are all in the System.Collections namespace and implement a number of different kinds of collections, including lists, queues, stacks, arrays, and hashtables. The collections contain Object instance references. Since all types derive ultimately from Object, any built-in or user-defined type may be stored in a collection.

In this section we will look at a representative class in this namespace, ArrayList, and see how to use array lists in our programs.

ArrayList Example

To get our bearings, let's begin with a simple example of using the ArrayList class. An array list, as the name suggests, is a list of items ...