Dictionaries
In the previous section, you learned about the Hashtable class, 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 the keys and values are of 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.
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 the initial content of the dictionary using the following code:
Dictionary<string, string> dictionary = new()
{
{ "Key #1", "Value #1" },
{ "Key #2"...