Accessing a Dictionary.Keys Key through a numeric index

Question

I\'m using a Dictionary where the int is a count of the key.

Now, I need to access the last-inserted Key inside the Dict

Answer 1

To expand on Daniels post and his comments regarding the key, since the key is embedded within the value anyway, you could resort to using a KeyValuePair as the value. The main reasoning for this is that, in general, the Key isn't necessarily directly derivable from the value.

Then it'd look like this:

public sealed class CustomDictionary
  : KeyedCollection>
{
  protected override TKey GetKeyForItem(KeyValuePair item)
  {
    return item.Key;
  }
}

To use this as in the previous example, you'd do:

CustomDictionary custDict = new CustomDictionary();

custDict.Add(new KeyValuePair("key", 7));

int valueByIndex = custDict[0].Value;
int valueByKey = custDict["key"].Value;
string keyByIndex = custDict[0].Key;