Why is Dictionary preferred over Hashtable in C#?

Question

In most programming languages, dictionaries are preferred over hashtables. What are the reasons behind that?

Answer 1

In .NET, the difference between Dictionary<,> and HashTable is primarily that the former is a generic type, so you get all the benefits of generics in terms of static type checking (and reduced boxing, but this isn't as big as people tend to think in terms of performance - there is a definite memory cost to boxing, though).