Tip of the Day – Time to move to Generic Collections for Silverlight.

In Silverlight 1.1 the non-generic collections were marked obsolete. We have announced that the non-generic collections will not be in Silverlight 2.0 at all, so if you're still using non-generic collections like ArrayList it is time to step up to the generic equivalents like List<T>

This is actually good news, because the generic collections are  simpler, more performant create type-safe libraries and create code that is easier to maintain. Besides, they're easier to use than it looks like at first.

You can learn about programming with generic collections in many places. Here are three to consider, depending on where you are on the managed code learning curve….

If you're going to be tackling learning Managed Code for the first time, then I personally would recommend learning C# from my favorite author: 

Programming C# 3.0 (Programming)
by Jesse Liberty, Donald Xie

Read more about this title…

We cover all of C# 3 with a focus on building .NET applications. Of course there really are a lot of good books on C#, so you'll want to look around.

eLearning If you prefer an on-line course that goes into depth about generics, you may want to take a look at Microsoft's Implementing Collections and Generics in the Microsoft .NET Framework ($18 month subscription $39.99)

 

Oreilly I also have a couple free articles on Generics up on the O'Reilly site.  What Are Generics, is written in VB and C# Generics is written in… you're way ahead of me.

They were written when Generic collections were introduced (2004/2005) but they should be fully up to date.

 

Best of luck.

About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects and is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen online courses. His latest book, Building APIs with .NET will be released early in 2025. Liberty is a Senior SW Engineer for CNH and he was a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a Microsoft MVP.
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