Tuesday, November 25, 2003

System.Collections.Generics

To keep up with the dittohead practice of writing down my comments to real Microsoft blogs as my own blog entries, I have to add this one:

So Brad Abrams said this about the new generic collections in Whidbey. And I wrote comment # 59!

Ok, with some luck this is going to be comment number 59 (I guess that means Brad Abrams won't ever see it!).

I though I had something new to say but after reading from the beginning trough Don Box comment, I just have to agree with Kenneth Brubaker.

In addition, I think I read once that for G<T> to be interpreted as G<System.Object> when no T was supplied there was no need for facades and was completely automatic (even compatible with the CLS). That could mean that you can forget creating the System.Collections.Generics namespace. You just dump the non generic collections and put the new generic collections in place. In the process, you help keeping the API clean and make everybody happy (including legacy code).

The alternative is to put Generics namespaces everywhere. Please, don't do it if you can avoid it. Let's make the framework look as if it was designed with generics in mind from the beginning!

Obviously I have been reading too much angle brackets, becacause Brad Abrams wouldn't be asking us for feedback on this if it was that simple. So why isn't it so simple Brad?

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