Understanding Generics in C#

A Comprehensive Guide to Reusable, Type-Safe, and Flexible Code

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When I started my coding journey in C# and learned to create projects, I always wondered if we could define classes and methods without specifying exact data types.

I got this answer when I came across Generics. This is a powerful feature in C# that allows devs exactly what I was wondering.

Web developers must always try to reusable code instead of repeating the same code multiple times — saves time, and code becomes efficient and maintainable.

What are Generics?

So technically, generics is like a placeholder where you can define your classes, methods, or even interfaces without worrying about the type of the code until it is instantiated or invoked.

What’s best thing is, you can work with different data types without duplicating your code.

For example, consider a non-generic ArrayList:

ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
list.Add(1);
list.Add("hello");
list.Add(3.14);

What happens here is that ArrayList will allow you to store any data type — which is flexible, but what you need to understand here is that it is prone to runtime errors.