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

Dictionary:

• It returns/throws Exception if we try to find a key which does not exist.

• It is faster than a Hashtable because there is no boxing and unboxing.

• Only public static members are thread safe.

• Dictionary is a generic type which means we can use it with any data type (When creating, must specify the data types for both keys and values).

  Example: Dictionary = new Dictionary();

• Dictionay is a type-safe implementation of Hashtable, Keys and Values are strongly typed.

Hashtable:

• It returns null if we try to find a key which does not exist.

• It is slower than dictionary because it requires boxing and unboxing.

• All the members in a Hashtable are thread safe,

• Hashtable is not a generic type,

• Hashtable is loosely-typed data structure, we can add keys and values of any type.