Specifying the type of ArrayList's elements

Question

I thought that there was some way in .net 3.0 to give an array list a type so that it didnt just return Object's but I'm having trouble doing so. Is it possible? If so, how?

Answer 1

List<T> was introduced with generics in .NET 2.0:

using System.Collections.Generic;

var list = new List<int>();
list.Add(1);
list.Add("string"); //compile-time error!
int i = list[0];

Answer 2

You're probably looking for List<T>, available since .NET 2.0, or for any other of the generic types available from System.Collections.Generic or System.Collections.ComponentModel.

Answer 3

If you have to use ArrayList and can't start using List, and you know the type of every element in that ArrayList you can do:

  string[] stringArray = myArrayList.ToArray(typeof(string)) as string[];

If something in myArrayList wasn't a string, in this case, you would get an InvalidCastException.

If you can, I would start using List as OregonGhost mentioned.