Best tutorial for the classes in System.Collections.Generic and System.Collections.Specialized namespaces?

Question

I am looking for a book or article that goes into great level of detail on the generic Collections in .NET comparing performance and providing good advice on when to use the different collections. I am interested both in theoretical and real-life information.

To be more concrete, have you seen any benchmarks comparing different collections? There are a bunch of then out there but is hard to trust the results as there are significant differences. Just search for Dictionary and SortedDictionary performance comparisons and you will see that there is not a final authorittive view on this topic.

Answer 1

Um...look for a decent data structures book for starters, I suppose. They're not too different from the containers you see elsewhere. After that, just read the MSDN documentation on the various classes in there. They do a pretty good job of spelling out the differences.

Answer 2

The best resource is MSDN:

System.Collections.Generic namespace

System.Collections.Specialized namespace

Also, here's a good article about generic collections in .NET

If you have more specific questions, StackOverflow users can help too ;-)

Answer 3

I found the following resources that I hope can be useful to others:

1. The MSDN general introduction of generic collections.
2. Jeremy Kuhne's articles i, ii, iii and iv