Dictionaries
In the previous section, you got to know the Hashtable
class as a non-generic variant of the hash table-related classes. However, it has a significant limitation, because it does not allow you to specify a type of a key and a value. Both the Key
and Value
properties of the DictionaryEntry
class are of the object
type. Therefore, you need to perform boxing and unboxing operations, even if all keys and values have the same type.
If you want to benefit from the strongly typed variant, you can use the Dictionary
generic class, which is the main subject of this section of the chapter.
First of all, you should specify two types namely, a type of a key and a value, while creating an instance of the Dictionary
class. Moreover, it is possible to define initial content of the dictionary using the following code:
Dictionary<string, string> dictionary = new Dictionary<string, string> { { "Key 1", "Value 1" }, { "Key 2", "Value 2" } };
In the preceding code, a new...