[.NET] Hashtable Generic

What is the generic version of a Hashtable?

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I have been learning the basics of generics in .NET. However, I don't see the generic equivalent of Hashtable. Please share some sample C# code for creating generic hashtable classes.

c# .net generics

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edited Jun 6 '17 at 17:18

Jon Schneider

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asked Apr 21 '09 at 14:23

Charlie

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Dictionary<TKey, TValue>

Note that Dictionary is not a 100% drop in replacement for HashTable.

There is a slight difference in the way they handle NULLs. The dictionary will throw an exception if you try to reference a key that doesn't exist. The HashTable will just return null. The reason is that the value might be a value type, which cannot be null. In a Hashtable the value was always Object, so returning null was at least possible.

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