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Selecting a Collection Class

Be sure to choose your collection class carefully. Using the wrong type can restrict your use of the collection. In general, avoid using the types in the System.Collections namespace unless you are specifically targeting .NET Framework version 1.1. The generic and concurrent versions of the collections are to be preferred because of their greater type safety and other improvements.

Consider the following questions:

LINQ to Objects and PLINQ

LINQ to Objects enables developers to use LINQ queries to access in-memory objects as long as the object type implements IEnumerable or IEnumerable<T>. LINQ queries provide a common pattern for accessing data, are typically more concise and readable than standard foreach loops, and provide filtering, ordering, and grouping capabilities. For more information, see LINQ to Objects.

PLINQ provides a parallel implementation of LINQ to Objects that can offer faster query execution in many scenarios, through more efficient use of multi-core computers. For more information, see Parallel LINQ (PLINQ).

See Also

Reference

System.Collections

System.Collections.Specialized

System.Collections.Generic

Other Resources

Creating and Manipulating Collections

Thread-Safe Collections