Essential C# 4.0

11. Generics

AS YOUR PROJECTS BECOME more sophisticated, you will need a better way to reuse and customize existing software. To facilitate code reuse, especially the reuse of algorithms, C# includes a feature called generics. Just as methods are powerful because they can take parameters, classes that take type parameters have significantly more functionality as well, and this is what generics enable. Like their predecessor, templates, generics enable the definition of algorithms and pattern implementations once, rather than separately for each type. However, C# generics are a type-safe implementation of templates that differs slightly in syntax and greatly in implementation from its predecessors in C++ and Java. Note that generics were added ...