.NET Collections mind map
Since I’m teaching .NET 101 course again, I decided that it would be helpful to have some mind maps on the topics we cover. The first such topic is .NET collections.
This post is not a complete manual, but rather a summary on the topic.
Collections in .NET consist of generic and non-generic collections. The latter exist because .NET 1 didn’t have generics, so they work with object, thus introducing problems with boxing and type checking. Generic collections solve these problems, so we should always use them.
Interfaces
The most important interfaces in collections (and probably in the whole .NET framework) are IEnumerator<T> and IEnumerable<T>. They give us the ability
to enumerate a collection. All other interfaces directly on indirectly extend these ones.
ICollection<T> adds methods Add, Remove, Contains, properties Count and IsReadOnly etc. on top of IEnumerable<T>.
IList<T> adds even more functionality on top of ICollection<T>, for example, an indexer.
IDictionary<TKey, TValue> is a base interface for dictionaries. Remember that it also extends IEnumerable<KeyValuePair>.
Classes
Array is the base class for all arrays in .NET, and it is one of the most used collection. All arrays implement ICollection<T>, but hide Add and Remove methods by an explicit implementation.
List<T> is a data structure similar to array (it actually works on top of it), but it also allows adding and removing elements. The disadvantage of
List<T> is slow Add and Remove (only when the inside array needs to be resized).
LinkedList<T> is a peer to List<T>. Each element of this collection has
links to previous and next elements, thus adding and removing elements is very fast. The disadvantage of this is access to individual elements is O(n).
Queue<T> is a data structure which corresponds to mnemonic rule “first-in-first-out”.
Stack<T> is a data structure which corresponds to mnemonic rule “last-in-first-out”.
Hashset<T> is a collection which doesn’t allow duplicates (it silently ignores them) and has O(1)(constant) search time (Contains method).
Dictionary<TKey, TValue> is a most used dictionary although there are other classes which implement IDictionary<TKey, TValue>.