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Generic Classes & Methods.: Value Types To Reference Types or Vice-Versa

Generics allow classes and methods to work with any data type. This provides type safety and avoids boxing/unboxing of value types. Generic classes encapsulate operations that do not depend on a specific data type, allowing the same underlying code to work for lists of different types. Generic methods can also be declared with type parameters to make them reusable across different type arguments.

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Jigar Kapadia
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19 views

Generic Classes & Methods.: Value Types To Reference Types or Vice-Versa

Generics allow classes and methods to work with any data type. This provides type safety and avoids boxing/unboxing of value types. Generic classes encapsulate operations that do not depend on a specific data type, allowing the same underlying code to work for lists of different types. Generic methods can also be declared with type parameters to make them reusable across different type arguments.

Uploaded by

Jigar Kapadia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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GENERICS

Generics allow you to define type-safe data structures, without committing to actual data types. In
other words, generics allow you to write a class or method that can work with any data type.
Simple words, Generics are used to separate logic from data type.

Features of Generics?

Allows you to write code/use library methods which are type-safe, i.e. a List<string> is
guaranteed to be a list of strings.

As a result of generics being used the compiler can perform compile-time checks on code for
type safety, i.e. are you trying to put an int into that list of strings.

Faster than using objects as it either avoids boxing/unboxing (where .net has to convert value
types to reference types or vice-versa).
Allows you to write code which is applicable to many types with the same underlying
behaviour, i.e. a Dictionary<string, int> uses the same underlying code as a
Dictionary<DateTime, double>; using generics, the framework team only had to write one piece
of code to achieve both results with the above advantages too.

GENERIC CLASSES & METHODS.


Generic classes encapsulate operations that are not specific to a particular data type. Operations such as adding
and removing items from the collection are performed in basically the same way regardless of the type of data
being stored.

Example
// Declare the generic class.
public class GenericList<T>
{
void Add(T input) { }
}
class TestGenericList
{
private class ExampleClass { }
static void Main()
{

// Declare a list of type int.


GenericList<int> list1 = new GenericList<int>();

// Declare a list of type string.


GenericList<string> list2 = new GenericList<string>();

// Declare a list of type ExampleClass.


GenericList<ExampleClass> list3 = new GenericList<ExampleClass>();
}
}

GENERIC METHODS.
A generic method is a method that is declared with type parameters,

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