Professional Visual Basic 2012 and .NET 4.5 Programming

Creating Generics

Now that you have a good idea how to use preexisting generics in your code, let's take a look at how you can create generic templates. The primary reason to create a generic template instead of a class is to gain strong typing of your variables. Anytime you find yourself using the Object data type, or a base class from which multiple types inherit, you may want to consider using generics. By using generics, you can avoid the use of CType or DirectCast, thereby simplifying your code. If you can avoid using the Object data type, you will typically improve the performance of your code.

As discussed earlier, there are generic types and generic methods. A generic type is basically a class or structure that assumes specific type characteristics when a variable is declared using the generic. A generic method is a single method that assumes specific type characteristics, even though the method might be in an otherwise very conventional class, structure, or module.

Generic Types

Recall that a generic type is a class, a structure, or an interface template. You can create such templates yourself to provide better performance, strong typing, and code reuse to the consumers of your types.

Classes

A generic class template is created in the same way that you create a normal class, except that you require the consumer of your class to provide you with one or more types for use in your code. In other words, as the author of a generic template, you have access to the type parameters ...