C# Generics and polymorphism: an oxymoron?

Question

I just want to confirm what I\'ve understood about Generics in C#. This has come up in a couple code bases I\'ve worked in where a generic base class is used to create type

Answer 1

I think you are misunderstanding the point of generics. Generics allows you to generalise a class that requires a type, but doesn't particularly care itself what type that is. For instance, a List is a list of strings, but what would a List be? It's a rather useless concept to have a list of nothing.

Each specialised class (ie, List) is it's own distinct type, and the compiler treats it as such. It is possible to get at the generic type itself (typeof(List<>) for instance), but in most cases it's useless, and you certainly can't make an instance of it.