In a comment, Stuart Ballard wrote: The general idea of a class that is usable both as a List and a Dictionary, maintaining an order and providing efficient access by both index and key, is a very useful one. Althought it's not immediately obvious, the OrderedSet and OrderedBag collections can be used to do just that with just a small amount of ...

I've posted an updated Power Collections 1.0 that has been recompiled (with slight source changes to address some base class library changes) for the released version of .NET 2.0. No new functionality has been added, nor has the documentation changed. As usual, the download is available here.

The release of Power Collections 1.0 is complete. There aren't many changes since the beta release a few weeks ago; mainly some updates to the tests and OrderedDictionary had a method renamed (Merge to AddMany). As soon as I have more information and thoughts about what happens next with Power Collections, I'll post some more information. But ...

A few other minor changes were in the latest drop that I didn't cover in my other posts: 1. Added a CLSCompliant attribute to the assembly. 2. The Pair struct added explicit conversions to and from KeyValuePair. 3. Set, Bag, OrderedSet, and OrderedBag added an IsDisjointFrom method. 4. Deque added a Clone method. 5. Deque and BigList added a ...

As I looked over all the methods in Algorithms, it seemed like I needed to be more disciplined in naming conventions so that the operations of methods would be more consistent and easy to understand. So I developed a nomenclature that I could attempt to use consistently across all the methods in Algorithms. Here's what I came up with: First: ...

In prior releases, all the collection classes were sealed, which prevent people from deriving from them. Although I still don't think that there are many good scenarios where it make sense to derive from Set, Bag, BigList, etc., I have unsealed them in the latest drop. This allows people to derive from them and add new methods; perhaps some ...

I did a review on CollectionBase, ListBase, DictionaryBase (and their read-only equivalents), and realized that a lot of the delegate-based methods that were added to List<T> really made sense on these classes. If you used these classes as bases to create your own collections, you now get a bunch more functionality “for free”. I ...

One interesting feature that was added in the latest drop is the support for accessing OrderedSet and OrderedBag by integer index. Recall that OrderedSet and OrderedBag maintain all the items in order, where order is defined by an IComparer or Comparison. When you could always iterate over the items in order, you can now get at any item by its ...

I've uploaded a new drop of Power Collections. This is quite close to what will be released as the 1.0 release of Power Collections, there are just a few more things to do (mainly making the classes serializable). You can consider this the “Beta“ release of PowerCollection 1.0. Any feedback that can be provided will be very useful to ...

An interesting discussion has been occurring in comments, and in this bug report, about the problems with IList and arrays that I discussed earlier. I think the discussion has correctly focussed in on a key problem: that the IsReadOnly property on ICollection<T> is too general to take into account the different kinds of changes that can be ...