C# 0 The Complete Reference

Inventory

 as a 

type argument to 

List

. Other than that, the two programs are nearly identical. The fact 

that the use of a generic collection requires virtually no additional effort and adds type 

safety argues strongly for its use when storing a specific type of object within a collection.

In general, there is one other thing to notice about the preceding programs: Both are 

quite short. When you consider that each sets up a dynamic array that can store, retrieve, 

and process inventory information in less than 40 lines of code, the power of collections 

begins to become apparent. As most readers will know, if all of this functionality had to be 

coded by hand, the program would have been several times longer. Collections offer ready-

to-use solutions to a wide variety of programming problems. You should use them 

whenever the situation warrants.

There is one limitation to the preceding programs that may not be immediately apparent: 

The collection can’t be sorted. The reason for this is that neither