Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Building Custom Collections

Generally built-in collections are good for most scenarios. There could be situations in which you need to implement custom collections. You have basically two alternatives: creating a collection from scratch or recur to inheritance. The first choice can be hard; typically 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 also 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 ...