Friday, April 08, 2005 2:57 AM
pgolde
Feature complete drop
Sorry that the project has been so slow the last two months, but it is has not come to a complete stop. There's been some good discussion in the forums; I'll be working on replying to more of the posts over the next two days.
Today I've posted a new drop of PowerCollections in the usual place. You can download the zip to get the source, binaries, and documentation. If you just want to browse documentation, just go here. This drop still uses the November tech preview of Visual C#. Rumor is that Beta 2 of Visual Studio will be released soon; as soon as that is publicly available, I'll be posting a version for Beta 2.
This version has a two new important classes: MultiDictionary and OrderedMultiDictionary, which map a key to multiple values. I'll post a description of these classes and the design thinking behind them in a subsequent posting.
This version also has a number of smaller changes:
1. The BigList class has been updated with many utility methods, to make it much closer to a replacement for the BCL List class.
2. Most collection classes now have a Comparer property to return the IComparer that the classes was constructed with.
3. Several renamings of methods to be better: AddAll became AddMany, RemoveAll become RemoveMany, SubsetOf became IsSubsetOf (and several similar renamings), AddTyping became TypedAs, RemoveTyping became Untyped, UniqueItems became DistinctItems.
4. The Range, RangeFrom, and RangeTo methods on the ordered collections now take additional boolean parameters indicating whether the endpoints of the range should be treated inclusively or exclusively.
With this drop, Power Collections version 1.0 is feature complete. From now on, I'm not planning to add any new collection types or major new features. Instead, I'm going to polish, fix, and get what is there ready for a final release. In the source, you will we a number of comments marked “UNDONE” and “CONSIDER”, which list a lot of the items that need to be addressed. I'll also be looking over the comments in the forums one more time to look at suggestions that have been made.