Hash Table

Question

Can anyone explain how hash table works in c#

ntokozo ngema · Answer

@Vulpes Thank you very much.....very appreciated

Vulpes · Answer

The internal workings of the Hashtable class are complicated and rather than repeat it all here I'd suggest you read the Remarks section in the MSDN docs for this class: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.collections.hashtable.aspx An important point to note is that all keys and values are stored internally as type System.Object. This means that value types (int double char etc) need to be 'boxed' when they are stored and 'unboxed' (using a cast) when they are retrieved which degrades performance. The Dictionary class doesn't have this problem because all keys and values are stored internally as their actual types and should therefore be preferred over Hashtable on performance grounds.