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.NET Generics interview questions: - Explain Generics and concept of Generic Collection in .NET?

By Shiv Prasad Koirala in .Net
May 30th, 2014
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Generics help to separate logic and data type to increase reusability. In other words you can create a class whose data type can be defined on run time.

For instance below is a simple class "class1" with a "compareme" function created using generics. You can see how the unknown data type is put in greater than and less than symbol. Even the compare me method has the unknown data type attached.

During runtime you can define the datatype as shown in the below code snippet.

Concept of Generic Collection in .NET: -

Array List, Stack and Queues provide collections which are not type safe. This leads 2 problems first it's not type safe and second it leads to boxing and unboxing.

By using generics we can have type safety and also we can avoid boxing and unboxing. Below is a simple code snippet which shows a strong typed list of type integer and string.