C# Tutorial - Generic List

Arrays are a staple in programming, but nowadays in this world of dynamic content, you often times need something more flexible. This is where the other C# collections come into play. A long time ago, I did a tutorial on a collection called a dictionary, but those types of collection have a niche. Today, I am going to go over its older brother and sensei of sorts, the List.

Lists are a lot more flexible than dictionaries, and are quicker and slightly simpler to use. The biggest advantage to both collections are that they are dynamic, allowing you to add entries as you go. Arrays are a predetermined size, while lists and other such collections are not. This allows us to add as many entries into the list as we want, which is a gigantic advantage.

To start, we are going to use our old friend Visual Studio, and of course C#. Once you have a C# Windows Forms project started up (I am using Visual C# 2008 Express, but it really does not matter in this tutorial, as long as you are using Visual Studio), all you need to do to the default form is add a Rich Textbox. This will display our information, rather than having a popup message for basic output.

The Windows Form you should have.

Once you have a textbox on your form, we need to go ahead and start adding code. All of our code today will be in a method, as part of the basic form class that is created by default. So you will have something like this:

Take notice at the using statements at the top of the code. These are all put there by default, but if you are missing the using System.Collections.Generic;, make sure you add it because you will not be able to use a list without including these collections.

The first thing we need to do is create our list, which can be do with the following code:

Notice the brackets after the List identifier, whatever is inside these brackets is the type of the objects the list will hold. In our case, we are creating a list of string objects, for now an empty list. In order to fill this list, we are going to create a simple loop and add to our list. To add to the list, there is actually a really simple method called (you guessed it) Add():

All we are doing is taking the list and adding an item to it every iteration of the loop. For each iteration we are adding a new string object, which is set to the current iteration +1, making it so our first item is 1 and not 0. Just like an array, lists are indexed, starting at 0. This means that we can add a line such as:

And it displays the first item in our list. But what if we want to output everything all at once? This is almost as simple. For that we use the string object, taking advantage of the static method join() which allows us to join the elements of an array. Wait, an array? Yes, we have to have an array to use the join() method, but thankfully the list object has a conversion for that. The toArray() will convert a list object to an array, giving us exactly what we need. The join call would look something like so:

The first argument is the seperator, and the second is the array to join, which in turn is our list conversion call. Notice we have to pass the type of array we want to convert to, but for simplicity sake we are just using a string array. This call would output all of our list items to the textbox. After one more little text addition, the final method looks like this:

A small, simple method that is the perfect example of what lists are all about. They are dynamic, flexing to what you need them for. Although they are limited by their type, their size is only limited by the computer on which they are used. But, before we part, we have to call this method somewhere. Right below the initialization is the perfect place:

Our textbox is filled with the list contents!

So, this is going to create a list, fill it, and output its contents all right after the form is created. While simple in concept, you can do a lot with lists, including creating a list of lists or a list of arrays. I hope this shows you at least a small part of the advantages of lists. Just remember, when you need coding help, all you have to do is Switch On The Code.