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

Time for action — creating a simple math question monitor


Follow the given steps:

  1. 1. Create a Windows application and call it NumberGame.

  2. 2. Put a label on the form which will display the questions. Call it lblQuestion.

  3. 3. Put a textbox on the form where kids will type their answers. Call it txtAnswer.

  4. 4. Put a button to submit the answer. Call it btnSubmit.

  5. 5. Put a button to generate a new question. Call it btnNewGame.

  6. 6. Put a label to show the current time. This will be used to measure how much time the kid took to answer the question.

  7. 7. Arrange everything as shown in the following screenshot. Add a good background image. This is a screenshot of the running app. So at design time, you can use any text to initialize the labels:

  8. 8. Put a timer control on the form. Leave the name as Timer1. Make sure it is enabled and the interval of the timer is set to 1000.

What just happened?

At this point, you can run the application but nothing will happen as we are yet to glue the buttons to the code...