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Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition
book

Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition

by Juval Lowy
July 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
644 pages
17h
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition

Generics Problem Statement

Consider an everyday data structure such as a stack, providing the classic Push() and Pop() methods. When you develop a general-purpose stack, you would probably like to use it to store instances of various types. Under C# 1.1, you have to use an object-based stack, meaning that the internal data type used in the stack is an amorphous object, and the stack methods interact with objects:

    public class Stack
    {
       object[] m_Items;
       public void Push(object item)
       {...}
       public object Pop()
       {...}
    }

Example D-1 shows the full implementation of the object-based stack.

Example D-1. An object-based stack

public class Stack
{
   const int DefaultSize = 100;
   readonly int m_Size;
   int m_StackPointer = 0;
   object[] m_Items;

   public Stack() : this(DefaultSize)
   {}  
   public Stack(int size)
   {
      m_Size = size;
      m_Items = new object[m_Size];
   }
   public void Push(object item)
   {
      if(m_StackPointer >= m_Size)
      {
         throw new StackOverflowException();
      }     
      m_Items[m_StackPointer] = item;
      m_StackPointer++;
   }
   public object Pop()
   {
      m_StackPointer--;
      if(m_StackPointer >= 0)
      {
         return m_Items[m_StackPointer];
      }
      else
      {
         m_StackPointer = 0;
         throw new InvalidOperationException("Cannot pop an empty stack");
      }
   }
}

Because object is the canonical .NET base type, you can use the object-based stack to hold any type of items, such as integers:

    Stack stack = new Stack();
    stack.Push(1);
    stack.Push(2);
    int number = (int)stack.Pop();

However, there are two problems with object-based solutions. The first issue is performance. ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596102070Supplemental ContentErrata Page