Generic Key/Value pair collection in that preserves insertion order?

Question

I\'m looking for something like a Dictionary however with a guarantee that it preserves insertion order. Since Dictionary is a hashtable, I do not think it does.<

Answer 1

There is an OrderedDictionary class that is a dictionary but can be indexed in insertion order, but it is not generified. There is not a generified one in the .Net framework at present.

I have read a comment somewhere from someone on the .Net team that said that they may implement a generified version in the future, but if so it would most likely be called IndexableDictionary instead of OrderedDictionary to make its behaviour more obvious.

EDIT: found the quote. It was on the MSDN page for OrderedDictionary, attributed to David M. Kean from Microsoft:

This type is actually misnamed; it is not an 'ordered' dictionary as such, but rather an 'indexed' dictionary. Although, today there is no equivalent generic version of this type, if we add one in the future it is likely that we will name such as type 'IndexedDictionary'.