VB Forum / General 2 / August 2006

"xxx" <arunpec121@yahoo.co.in>'s wild thoughts were released
on 28 Aug 2006 20:56:22 -0700 bearing the following fruit:

dotnet groups have 'dotnet' in their name, this one if for
VB6 (and below)

Jan Hyde (VB MVP)

xxx,

As stated, this is probably not as good a place as the .net newsgroups.
Those have already been pointed out to you, so I won't repost those -
but, I will give you a brief answer to your question:

Simple generics example:

Option Strict On
Option Explicit On

Imports System
Imports System.Collections.Generic

Module Module1

   Sub Main()
       Dim lst1 As New List(Of Integer)(New Integer() {1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
6})
       Dim lst2 As New List(Of String)(New String() {"a", "b", "c",
"d", "e"})

       Console.WriteLine("List 1")
       WriteList(lst1)

       Console.WriteLine("List 2")
       WriteList(lst2)

   End Sub

   Sub WriteList(Of T)(ByVal lst As List(Of T))
       For Each item As T In lst
           Console.WriteLine(item)
       Next
       Console.WriteLine()
   End Sub

End Module

As for the merits of generics...

Speed, since using genrics avoids boxing operations - which  was
especially prevalent when using value types with collections in 1.0 and
1.1 (ArrayList, HashTable, etc).

Type saftey - again since ArrayList and the other collection objects
accepted any object, it was possible to stick objects of mutiple types
in a list.  Sometimes that's what you want - but, most often it isn't.
The solution in 1.0 and 1.1 was to write a custom collection object to
store your objects.  Now, with generics you don't have to.

I could probably come up with others, but these are the two biggest off
the top of my head.  As for it's relation to the runtime - well,
generics are integral part of the 2.0 runtime.  That's why 2.0
assemblies can't be run on 1.0 and 1.1 runtimes - the metadata format
has changed, so they those runtimes can't load 2.0 assemblies.

--
Tom Shelton