Question

While reading about generics I came across those two chunks of code, and I was wondering if they were identical?

public abstract class Search<T, TCollection, TCriteria>
        where TCollection : Collection<Name>
        where T : Name

AND:

public abstract class Search<Name, Collection<Name>, TCriteria>

Answer 1

As Lasse pointed out, your second version doesn’t compile. If you changed it to

public abstract class Search<Name, Collection, TCriteria>

it would compile, but it wouldn’t do what you wanted it to do: This just specifies a generic class with three type parameters called Name, Collection and TCriteria. But it doesn’t limit them in any way, so you could create an instance like Search<int, long, ulong>.

Type parameters usually start with T, but the language doesn’t enforce it in any way.

So the difference is that the second version doesn’t work, use the first one.