What are Generic Collections in C#? [duplicate]

Answer 1

What makes a "generic list" generic is the fact, that you can use the same class to create a list of apples and a list of potatoes. Of course once you create a list with the new operator you have to decide what objects you want it to store and communicate your decision by putting the Type name of the objects you store in the <>.

The following line actually tells the compiler:

List<Employee> employeeList = new List<Employee>();

"Hey, I need a list that can handle objects of type Employee; and is named employeeList!"

The list object you get that way is not generic anymore. It will only accept and return objects of type Employee. But the list's behavior is defined in a "generic" way that doesn't care about what objects it's actually working with. It just calls them 'T' internally because for all that the list is supposed to do, it's contents type doesn't really matter.

Answer 2

List<T> means List<WhateverTypeYouWantItToBeAListOf>. So for example:

If I have an Employee Class, and I wanted a collection of Employees, I could say:

List<Employee> employeeList = new List<Employee>();

I could then add Employee Objects to that list, and have it be Type-safe and extend to however many employee objects I put in it.

Like so:

Employee emp1 = new Employee();
Employee emp2 = new Employee();

employeeList.Add(emp1);
employeeList.Add(emp2);

employeeList now holds emp1 and emp2 as objects.

There are several facets to generic collections, the most important being they provide an object independent way of having a... well... collection of objects. They are type-safe; which means that any collection will consist of one type of object. You won't have a Animal instance inside of List<Employee> (unless, of course, Employee is a base class that Animal inherits from. At that point, however, you have bigger problems.

Programming with Generics is its own topic, worthy of (at least) one chapter in a book. At a very high level, programming with generics provides another way to reuse code -- independent of any class hierarchy or implementation details of a specific class.

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