Microsoft Visual C# Step by Step, Ninth Edition

CHAPTER 17

Introducing generics

After completing this chapter, you will be able to:

• Explain the purpose of generics.

• Define a type-safe class by using generics.

• Create instances of a generic class based on types specified as type parameters.

• Implement a generic interface.

• Define a generic method that implements an algorithm independent of the type of data on which it operates.

Chapter 8, “Understanding values and references,” shows you how to use the object type to refer to an instance of any class. You can use the object type to store a value of any type, and you can define parameters by using the object type when you need to pass values of any type into a method. A method can also return values of any type by specifying object as the return ...