Question

What is the C# equivalent of NSMutableArray and NSArray?

Does C# have a mutable and non-mutable? I noticed that string appears to be mutable by default.

As a bonus, how do I quickly populate the array in C#?

Answer 1

That would be ArrayList and object[] respectively, if you take the weak typing nature of NSMutableArray and NSArray into account.

Arrays and lists in C# (at least for .NET 2.0 and above) can also be strongly-typed, so depending on what kind of object you’re storing you can specify that type. For example if you only have NSString objects in an NSMutableArray in your Objective-C code, you’d use List<string>, and if you have them in an NSArray, you’d use string[] with a fixed size instead.

To quickly initialize and populate a list or an array in C#, you can use what’s known as a collection initializer:

List<string> list = new List<string> { "foo", "bar", "baz" };
string[] array = { "foo", "bar", "baz" }; // Shortcut syntax for arrays

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string in C# is immutable, just like NSString in the Foundation framework. Every time you assign a new string to a variable, you simply point or refer the variable to a different object.