C# 0 The Complete Reference

System.Collections

 also defines three abstract base classes, 

CollectionBase

,

ReadOnlyCollectionBase

, and 

DictionaryBase

, which can be inherited and used as a 

starting point for developing custom specialized collections.

The Generic Collections

The addition of generics greatly expanded the Collections API, essentially doubling the 

amount of collection classes and interfaces. The generic collections are declared in the 

System.Collections.Generic

 namespace. In many cases, the generic collection classes are 

simply generic equivalents of the non-generic classes discussed earlier. However, the 

correspondence is not one-to-one. For example, there is a generic collection called 

LinkedList

that implements a doubly linked list, but no non-generic equivalent. In some cases, parallel 

functionality exists between the generic and non-generic classes, but the names differ. For 

example, the generic version of 

ArrayList

 is called 

List

, and the generic version of 

HashTable

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