Question

Say I have a Dictionary, and I add each key and value entry in a specific order.
Now, if I want later to be able to iterate this Dictionary in the same order entries were added, is it the order I get with simple foreach loop on this dictionary?

If not, I will be glad to hear how can I do that, I know this can be done easily with List instead of Dictionary but I don’t want to.

Thanks

Answer 1

Normal Dictionary does not guarantee order of items.

You need OrderedDictionary if you want to maintain order items where added to it. Note that there is no generic version of this class in .Net framework, so either have to give up some type-safety or find other implementation (i.e. https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/18615/OrderedDictionary-T-A-generic-implementation-of-IO as suggested by Tim S).

Alternatively if O(log n) lookup is fine and keys should be sorted – SortedDictionary.