Programming Microsoft® Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory

C. Simplest Example

1. The facing page shows an example of using a generic collection to obtain the benefits of strong typing and avoid the performance drag of boxing. I first instantiate an object of the class System.Collections.Generic.List, which is an expandable array, the generic equivalent of ArrayList. In its angle brackets I pass the type that I want it to hold, in this case, int. The developers of this class have written it in such a manner as to check the type that it is passed and allocate storage for holding its value, so boxing and unboxing don't take place, as you can see in Figure A-3. (We see these techniques in the next example.)

   The compiler now knows that this list accepts only integers, so storing an integer in it is allowed, as ...