Storing data with collections
If you need to store multiple values, you can use a collection. A collection is a data structure in memory that can manage multiple items in different ways, although all collections have some shared functionality.
There are two main namespaces for collections:
System.Collections
: Avoid the types in this namespace because they store any type that derives fromSystem.Object
, that is, every type (which is flexible but not type safe, thus leading to errors and boxing of value types, which can be slow and inefficient).System.Collections.Generic
: The types in this namespace were introduced in C# 2 with .NET 2.0 and are better because they allow you to specify the type you want to store (which is safer, faster, and more efficient). ...
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