Understanding Generics

Abstract

The most primitive container for application data within the .NET platform is the System. Array class. As you saw in Chapter 4, VB 2010 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).