Visual Basic® .NET by Example

Hashtable

The Hashtable class implements the IDictionary and ICollection interfaces, as well as ICloneable, ISerializable, and IDeserializationEventListener (which are not collection-specific, so you will ignore here).

A hash table is a collection of key-value pairs implemented using a hash table algorithm. The keys must override the GetHashCode and Equals methods of the Object class. Key objects must be also immutable (that is, their attributes or state cannot be changed). The most commonly used keys are String objects, which match all these criteria. The values can be any objects.

NOTE

A hash table can be thought of as an array of buckets holding key-value pairs; each bucket is indexed by a value that is derived from the key, using a special ...