C# 4.0 The Complete Reference

CHAPTER 18Generics

This chapter examines one of C#’s most sophisticated and powerful features: generics. Interestingly, although generics are now an indispensable part of C# programming, they were not included in the original 1.0 release. Instead, they were added by C# 2.0. It is not an overstatement to say that the addition of generics fundamentally changed the character of C#. Not only did it add a new syntactic element, it also added new capabilities and resulted in many changes and upgrades to the library. Although it has been a few years since the inclusion of generics in C#, the effects still reverberate throughout the language.

The generics feature is so important because it enables the creation of classes, structures, interfaces, methods, ...