Programming C#, 4th Edition

Chapter 9. Arrays, Indexers, and Collections

The .NET Framework provides a rich suite of collection classes. With the advent of generics in 2.0 most of these collection classes are now type-safe, making for a greatly enhanced programming experience. These classes include the Array, List, Dictionary, Sorted Dictionary, Queue, and Stack.

The simplest collection is the Array, the only collection type for which C# provides built-in support. In this chapter, you will learn to work with single, multidimensional, and jagged arrays. Arrays have built-in indexers, allowing you to request the nth member of the array. In this chapter you will also be introduced to creating your own indexers, a bit of C# syntactic sugar that makes it easier to access class properties as though the class were indexed like an array.

The .NET Framework provides a number of interfaces, such as IEnumerable and ICollection, whose implementation provides you with standard ways to interact with collections. In this chapter, you will see how to work with the most essential of these. The chapter concludes with a tour of commonly used .NET collections, including List, Dictionary, Queue, and Stack.

Tip

In previous versions of C#, the collection objects were not type-safe (you could, for example, mix strings and integers in a Dictionary). The nontype-safe versions, of List (ArrayList), Dictionary, and Queue, and Stack are still available for backward compatibility but won’t be covered in this book because their use is similar ...