Professional Visual Basic 2012 and .NET 4.5 Programming

Generics

Generics refer to the technology built into the .NET Framework (introduced originally with the .NET Framework version 2.0) that enables you to define a template and then declare variables using that template. The template defines the operations that the new type can perform; and when you declare a variable based on the template, you are creating a new type. The benefit of generics over untyped collections or arrays is that a generic template makes it easier for collection types to be strongly typed. The introduction of covariance in .NET Framework 4 makes it easier to reuse the template code in different scenarios.

The primary motivation for adding generics to .NET was to enable the creation of strongly typed collection types. Because generic collection types are strongly typed, they are significantly faster than the previous inheritance-based collection model. Anywhere you presently use collection classes in your code, you should consider revising that code to use generic collection types instead.

Visual Basic 2012 allows not only the use of preexisting generics, but also the creation of your own generic templates. Because the technology to support generics was created primarily to build collection classes, it naturally follows that you might create a generic collection anytime you would otherwise build a normal collection class. More specifically, anytime you find yourself using the Object data type, you should instead consider using generics.

Using Generics

There are ...