Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2010 Developer’s Handbook

Chapter 19. Arrays and Collections

In this chapter:
Array Basics
Initializing Arrays
Enumerators
Collection Basics
Initializing Collections
Important Collections of .NET Framework
Generic Collections

Arrays have been available in almost all derivatives of BASIC for decades—and of course, they’re available in Microsoft Visual Basic, as well. But the Microsoft .NET Framework wouldn’t be the .NET Framework if it didn’t offer arrays with many more possibilities than simple data access via a numeric index.

This means that the performance of arrays reaches far beyond the simple provision of containers for saving the elements of a data type. Because arrays are based on Object and therefore form a class of their own (namely System.Array), .NET Framework ...