Basic Knowledge On Generics

Features of generics and generic methods.

Introduction

Generics allow you to define the specification of the data type of programming elements in a class or a method until it is actually used in the program. In other words, generics allow you to write a class or method that can work with any data type.

Features of Generics

Generics is a technique that makes your programs in the following ways,

• It helps you to maximize code reuse, type safety, and performance.
• You can create generic collection classes. The .NET Framework class library contains several new generic collection classes in the System.Collections.Generic namespace. You may use these generic collection classes instead of the collection classes in the System.Collections namespace.
• You can create your own generic interfaces, classes, methods, events, and delegates.
• You may create generic classes constrained to enable access to methods on particular data types.
• You may get information on the types used in a generic data type at run-time by means of reflection.

Generic Methods

We can declare a generic method with a type parameter. The following program illustrates the concept.

When code is executed then the result is,