Lot of times I see myself going back to the books to check which ‘collection’ would be the best suited for a particular activity I am performing in my code. After doing this several times I thougt it would be great to create a cheat-sheet of all the collections and where they can be used efficiently.

Now that I have had it for several months, I thought I should share it on the world wide web ! So help yourself -

ArrayList:

Simple, resizeable, index-based collection of objects

SortedList:

Sorted collection of name/value pairs of objects

Queue:

First In First Out (FIFO) collection of objects

Stack:

Last In First Out (LIFO) collection of objects

Hashtable:

Collection of name/value pairs of objects that allow retrieval by name or index

BitArray:

Compact collection of boolean values

StringCollection:

Simple collection of resizeable collection of strings

StringDictionary:

Collection of name/value pairs of strings that allow retrieval by name or index

ListDictionary:

Efficient collection to store small lists of objects

HybridDictionary:

Collection that uses ListDictionary for storage when the number of items in the collection is small, and then migrates the items to a Hashtable for large collection

NameValueCollection:

Collection of name/value pairs of strings that allows retrieval by name or index