.NET 4.0 Generics Beginner's Guide

Best practices when creating custom generic collections

The following are the best practices while creating custom generic collections:

1. Try to use built-in generic classes for maintaining internal data structures.
2. Try to use interfaces as return type and method arguments for publicly exposed methods for your collection. For example, consider using IEnumerable<T> over List<T>.
3. Try to keep the names aligned as much as possible towards the names available in frameworks. For example, if you are creating a concrete implementation of IDictionary<TKey,TValue> then try to use the suffix Dictionary in the name of the class, such as MultiDictionary<TKey,TValue>.
4. Try to provide overloaded constructors to offer flexibility such that the class can be created from ...