OK, so the title of this blog is Confessions of a Webgypsy and as far as I can tell I really haven’t made any confessions up to this point.  So as a matter of complying with any truth in advertising clauses, I have decided to issue a confession as today’s post.  I have been excited about the upcoming release of VS2005 but have been so busy with the tasks I currently have that I haven’t been able to spend any time researching the new features.  I keep hearing all this buzz about this cool new concept called Generics, but I had NO IDEA what it was all about.  I actually had a little bit of free time this week and stumbled across a link for a free book introducing the new features for VB.NET.

So what is generics?

Well for a “generic” short answer it’s essentially a new set of collection classes.  The advantage to these are that these are type-safe and strongly typed so that you can have a collection of objects and reference them with a Key value of a type of your choosing.  This also gives you the ability to use good-old intellisense when accessing the properties of objects stored in one of these collections. 

Yes, I know this happens to be a REALLY short, OVERLY broad answer to the question, but I just want to give others with the lack of knowledge about this cool feature a quick glimpse of what we have to look forward to.  If you want more information, go to the link I listed above and read the introduction.