Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

Building Custom Collections

Built-in collections are good for most scenarios. In some situations you might need to implement custom collections. You have two options: creating a collection from scratch or recur to inheritance. The first choice can be hard. You create a class implementing the ICollection(Of T) and IList(Of T) (or IDictionary) interfaces, but you need to manually write code for performing the most basic actions onto items. The other choice is inheriting from an existing collection. This is a good choice for another reason: You can create your custom base class for other collections. Imagine you want to create a custom collection that stores sets of FileInfo objects, each one representing a file on disk. It would not be useful ...