Book Image

.NET 4.0 Generics Beginner's Guide

By : Sudipta Mukherjee
Book Image

.NET 4.0 Generics Beginner's Guide

By: Sudipta Mukherjee

Overview of this book

Generics were added as part of .NET Framework 2.0 in November 2005. Although similar to generics in Java, .NET generics do not apply type erasure but every object has unique representation at run-time. There is no performance hit from runtime casts and boxing conversions, which are normally expensive..NET offers type-safe versions of every classical data structure and some hybrid ones. This book will show you everything you need to start writing type-safe applications using generic data structures available in Generics API. You will also see how you can use several collections for each task you perform. This book is full of practical examples, interesting applications, and comparisons between Generics and more traditional approaches. Finally, each container is bench marked on the basis of performance for a given task, so you know which one to use and when. This book first covers the fundamental concepts such as type safety, Generic Methods, and Generic Containers. As the book progresses, you will learn how to join several generic containers to achieve your goals and query them efficiently using Linq. There are short exercises in every chapter to boost your knowledge. The book also teaches you some best practices, and several patterns that are commonly available in generic code. Some important generic algorithm definitions are present in Power Collection (an API created by Wintellect Inc.) that are missing from .NET framework. This book shows you how to use such algorithms seamlessly with other generic containers. The book also discusses C5 collections. Java Programmers will find themselves at home with this API. This is the closest to JCF. Some very interesting problems are solved using generic containers from .NET framework, C5, and PowerCollection Algorithms ñ a clone of Google Set and Gender Genie for example! The author has also created a website (http://www.consulttoday.com/genguide) for the book where you can find many useful tools, code snippets, and, applications, which are not the part of code-download section
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
.NET 4.0 Generics
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
2
Lists
4
LINQ to Objects
Migration Cheat Sheet

Why have we used Tuples?


The board at any time can be represented as a list of three different integers attached together:

  1. 1. The index of the tile

  2. 2. The expected value of the tile in order for the game to end

  3. 3. The actual value of the tile in that index right now

Note

Tips!

Tuples are a great way of representing database tables. There are eight overloaded versions of Tuple constructors. You can use one of them or use the static Create() method of the Tuple class. The last parameter for the last overload is another Tuple itself. So, you can plug in another Tuple if you need more than seven parameters.

For example, the board we have now and our goal (to finish the game) board are as follows:

If we had to represent this without Tuples, we would have had to create a dump placeholder class with three values and create a list of such class objects. But the construct: List<Tuple<int, int, int>> board = new List<Tuple<int, int, int>>(); helps remove that special need. A list...