Professional .NET 2.0 Generics

Although generics are new to .NET platform, the concepts that motivated their introduction have been around for years. However, while their value was often acknowledged, they were frequently stereotyped as being highly complex, unwieldy, and unapproachable. This reputation always seemed to obscure their value and limit their ability to capture the mindshare of the broader population of developers. The real truth here, though, is that generics simply couldn’t become truly mainstream without first having more languages and environments add support for generics. And, prior to version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, Visual Basic, C# and J#, developers were unable to use any generic constructs. As a result, many of these developers remained unaware of the power and value of generics. You can’t miss something if you’ve never had it.