Question

I have a Collection<T> property that wraps a array like

T[] array;

public Collection<T> Items
{
     get { return new Collection<T>(array); }
}

When I attempt to assign to the collection via:

T variable;
Items[i] = variable;

I get a NotSupportedException because the colleciton’s IsReadOnly property is true. Turns out that this is a design choice by Microsoft. Does anyone know a workaround that does NOT involve enumeration? It could be done if the underlying data is not an array but I enjoy the performance gains because the data is fixed length.

Answer 1

No there is no way around this. Arrays implementation of Collection<T> fits the read only model which means it will throw on attempted writes.

If you need to have a mutable collection then I would suggest using a List<T> under the hood instead of an array. You can force it to have the same initial size as well.