Question

I had another developer ask why I use List all over the place … and I thought about it for a minute … and couldn’t come up with a definitive answer.

If you inherit from the collection base class to extend instead of using List(Of T) – what advantages do you get? Or – what don’t you get with List?

Answer 1

Generic List gives you performance boost.

See this question:

Do C# Generics Have a Perfomance Benefit?

Quote from MSDN:

It is to your advantage to use the type-specific implementation of the List<(Of <(T>)>) class instead of using the ArrayList class or writing a strongly typed wrapper collection yourself. The reason is your implementation must do what the .NET Framework does for you already, and the common language runtime can share Microsoft intermediate language code and metadata, which your implementation cannot.