.NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference, Volume 1: Base Class Library and Extended Numerics Library

System.Collections

Organizing collections of objects is a vital but boring task that operating system designers have historically left to language implementers. Naturally, every language's and every vendor's implementation of collections varied drastically, making it essentially impossible for different applications to exchange, say, an array of objects without having intimate knowledge of each other's internal workings.

With the System.Collections namespace, Microsoft has brought the common implementation philosophy to the mundane task of organizing collections of objects. Rather than depend on individual languages to implement such common concepts as arrays and hash tables, Microsoft decided to bring them into the .NET Framework, thereby standardizing ...