Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

Chapter 10. Understanding Generics

The most primitive container for application data within the .NET platform is the System.Array class. As you saw in Chapter 4, C# arrays allow you to define a set of identically typed items (including an array of System.Objects, which essentially represents an array of any type of data) of a fixed upper limit. While basic arrays can be useful to manage small amounts of known data, there are many other times where you require a more flexible data structure, such as a dynamically growing and shrinking container, or a container that can only hold objects that meet a specific criteria (e.g., only objects deriving from a specific base class or only objects implementing a particular interface).

When the .NET platform ...