Pro .NET Performance

CHAPTER 5

Collections and Generics

There is scarcely even a code sample that doesn’t use a collection such as a List<T> or a Dictionary <K,V>. Large applications may have hundreds of thousands of collection instances in concurrent use. Selecting the right collection type for your needs — or trying to do better by writing your own — can provide significant performance benefits to many applications. Because as of .NET 2.0, collections are intimately linked with the CLR implementation of generic types, we begin our discussion with generics.

Generics

Often enough the need arises to create a class or method that can work equally well with any data ...