Visual Basic® Programmer's Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library

Managing Collections of Objects

Our applications often need to manage data in groups. For instance, we may have a set of similar database records that we want to iterate through, or perhaps we need to sort values in an array. To do so, we typically place this data into a collection for easy management and storage. A collection is simply a class that exposes properties and methods for working with a group of like data. Collection classes often implement standard interfaces that allow us to retrieve, count, and generally order our data in our application.

Depending on our design and requirements, a surprising number of collection strategies are available to us. The Framework Class Library exposes all-purpose collections (such as the ArrayList