Sams Teach Yourself C# 5.0 in 24 Hours

Hour 12. Understanding Generics

What You’ll Learn in This Hour

• Why you should use generics

• Using generic methods

• Creating generic classes

• Combining generics and arrays

• Variance in generic interfaces

• Working with tuples

You have already seen how an object can refer to an instance of any class. This enables you to create classes that operate on any data type. Several significant problems can occur with this approach. By working only with object, there is no way for the class to restrict input to be only of a specific type. To perform meaningful operations on the data, it must be cast from object to a more well-defined type. This not only adds complexity, but also sacrifices type safety at compile time.

Generics in C# solve this problem ...