Generics vs. Array Lists

Question

The system I work on here was written before .net 2.0 and didn\'t have the benefit of generics. It was eventually updated to 2.0, but none of the code was refactored due to

Answer 1

If the entities in the ArrayLists are Object types, you'll gain a little from not casting them to the correct type. If they're Value types (structs or primitives like Int32), then the boxing/unboxing process adds a lot of overhead, and Generic collections should be much faster.

Here's an MSDN article on the subject