Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

DICTIONARIES

A dictionary is a collection that associates keys with values. You look up a key, and the dictionary provides you with the corresponding value. This is similar to the way a NameValueCollection works, except that a dictionary’s keys and values need not be strings, and a dictionary associates each key with a single value object.

Visual Studio provides several different kinds of dictionary classes that are optimized for different uses. Their differences come largely from the ways in which they store data internally. Although you don’t need to understand the details of how the dictionaries work internally, you do need to know how they behave so that you can pick the best one for a particular purpose.

Because all of the dictionary classes provide the same service (associating keys with values), they have roughly the same properties and methods. The following table describes some of the most useful of these.

PROPERTY/METHOD	DESCRIPTION
Add	Adds a key/value pair to the dictionary.
Clear	Removes all key/value pairs from the dictionary.
Contains	Returns True if the dictionary contains a specific key.
CopyTo	Copies the dictionary’s data starting at a particular position into a one-dimensional array of DictionaryEntry objects. The DictionaryEntry class has Key and Value properties.
Count	Returns the number of key/value pairs in the dictionary.
Item	Gets or sets the value associated with a key.
Keys	Returns a collection containing all of the dictionary’s keys. ...