Chapter 9. Arrays, Indexers, and Collections

The .NET Framework provides a rich suite of collection classes, including Array, ArrayList, NameValueCollection, StringCollection, Queue, Stack, and BitArray.

The simplest collection is the Array, the only collection type for which C# provides built-in support. In this chapter, you will learn to work with single, multidimensional, and jagged arrays. You will also be introduced to indexers, a bit of C# syntactic sugar that makes it easier to access class properties, as though the class were indexed like an array.

The .NET Framework provides a number of interfaces, such as IEnumerable and ICollection, whose implementation provides you with standard ways to interact with collections. In this chapter, you will see how to work with the most essential of these. The chapter concludes with a tour of commonly used .NET collections, including ArrayList, Hashtable, Queue, and Stack.