ArrayList Class

The ArrayList is not guaranteed to be sorted. You must sort the ArrayList prior to performing operations (such as BinarySearch) that require the ArrayList to be sorted.

The capacity of an ArrayList is the number of elements the ArrayList can hold. As elements are added to an ArrayList, the capacity is automatically increased as required through reallocation. The capacity can be decreased by calling TrimToSize or by setting the Capacity property explicitly.

Elements in this collection can be accessed using an integer index. Indexes in this collection are zero-based.

The ArrayList collection accepts null as a valid value, allows duplicate elements.

Using multidimensional arrays as elements in an ArrayList collection is not supported.

The following code example shows how to create and initialize an ArrayList and how to print out its values.

using System;
using System.Collections;
public class SamplesArrayList  {

   public static void Main()  {

      // Creates and initializes a new ArrayList.
      ArrayList myAL = new ArrayList();
      myAL.Add("Hello");
      myAL.Add("World");
      myAL.Add("!");

      // Displays the properties and values of the ArrayList.
      Console.WriteLine( "myAL" );
      Console.WriteLine( "    Count:    {0}", myAL.Count );
      Console.WriteLine( "    Capacity: {0}", myAL.Capacity );
      Console.Write( "    Values:" );
      PrintValues( myAL );
   }

   public static void PrintValues( IEnumerable myList )  {
      foreach ( Object obj in myList )
         Console.Write( "   {0}", obj );
      Console.WriteLine();
   }

}


/* 
This code produces output similar to the following:

myAL
    Count:    3
    Capacity: 4
    Values:   Hello   World   !

*/

.NET Framework

.NET Framework Client Profile

Windows 7, Windows Vista SP1 or later, Windows XP SP3, Windows XP SP2 x64 Edition, Windows Server 2008 (Server Core not supported), Windows Server 2008 R2 (Server Core supported with SP1 or later), Windows Server 2003 SP2

Public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe.

An ArrayList can support multiple readers concurrently, as long as the collection is not modified. To guarantee the thread safety of the ArrayList, all operations must be done through the wrapper returned by the Synchronized method.

Enumerating through a collection is intrinsically not a thread-safe procedure. Even when a collection is synchronized, other threads can still modify the collection, which causes the enumerator to throw an exception. To guarantee thread safety during enumeration, you can either lock the collection during the entire enumeration or catch the exceptions resulting from changes made by other threads.

Reference

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