Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Introducing Generics

Generic types are .NET types that can adapt their behavior to different kind of objects without the need of defining a separate version of the type. In other words, you can implement an only generic type to work with integers, strings, custom reference types, and any other .NET type with a single implementation. Generics offer several advantages:

• Strongly typed programming techniques: Generic objects can hold only the specified type and avoid accidents of handling objects of different types within the same group.

• Better performances: Because Generics enable handling only the specified type, they avoid the need of boxing and unboxing from and to System.Object, and this retains for performance overhead.

• Code reuse: ...