Beginning C# 2008 Objects: From Concept to Code

6.5. Summary

In this chapter, you learned the following:

• Collections are special types of objects used to gather up and manage references to other objects.

• An array is a simple, fixed-length collection type that stores elements of a single type.

• In addition to arrays, the .NET FCL provides other more powerful collection types to draw upon with OOPL, such as the following:

  • Ordered lists

  • Sets

  • Dictionaries

• Generic collection classes can be used to achieve reusability, type-safety, and efficiency when working with collections.

• We can work around the limitation that a method can only return one result by having that result be a collection of objects.

• Declaring a collection of supertypes can be used to make arrays and generic collections more versatile.