Essential C# 5.0

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 arguments, types and methods that take type arguments have significantly more functionality.

Generics are lexically similar to generic types in Java and templates in C++. In all three languages, these features enable the implementation of algorithms and patterns once, rather than requiring separate implementations for each type the algorithm or pattern operates upon. However, C# generics are very different from both Java generics and C++ templates in the details of their ...