Binary Search a List of custom data types to match just one field

Question

I have a List:

List allStudents = new List(); 

that contains over 94,000 Student objects, where Student is define

Answer 1

List.BinarySearch is a good solution and works like you would expect. Here's a link that shows a solution similar to what you'll need for the IComparer. Their example doesn't use the Generic IComparer, though.

public class CompareCustomDataType : IComparer {

  public int Compare(Student x, Student y)
  {
    if (x == y)    return 0;
    if (x == null) return -1;
    if (y == null) return 1;

    return String.Compare(x.Surname, y.Surname);
  }
...
}