.NET 4.0 Generics Beginner's Guide

Best practices when using Generics

The following are the best practices to be followed while using Generics:

1. Don't use Generics when you know the situation won't always be generic.
2. Use Stack<T> for a Last In First Out (LIFO) list implementation.
3. Use Queue<T> for a First In First Out (FIFO) implementation.
4. Use List<T> for random access lists with zero-based indexing.
5. Use LinkedList<T> to implement a deque because it offers faster insertion and deletion at both ends as opposed to other collections.
6. If you have to frequently insert random locations in the list, prefer LinkedList<T> over List<T> because LinkedList<T> is a constant time operation to insert one item in between two elements in a linked list.
7. If the random list does not have a duplicate, use ...