Visual Basic 2005 for Programmers: Deitel Developer Series, Second Edition

26.1. Introduction

In chapter 24, we discussed how to create and manipulate data structures. The discussion was “low level” in the sense that we painstakingly created each element of each data structure dynamically with New and modified the data structures by directly manipulating their elements and references to their elements. In this chapter, we consider the prepackaged data-structure classes provided by the .NET Framework. These classes are known as collection classes—they store collections of data. Each instance of one of these classes is a collection of items. Some examples of collections are the cards you hold in a card game, the songs stored in your computer, the real-estate records in your local registry of deeds (which map book numbers ...