How does a Hashtable internally maintain

Question

Hi.. Ques : Hello friend now I an working collection in a .NET. In a collection i am using Hashtable but i am not understaind How does a Hashtable internally maintain the key-value pairs?

Sam Hobbs · Answer

You can learn a lot using Visual Studio. In a program that you are using a Hashtable put the cursor on Hashtable and press F12.

Jignesh Trivedi · Answer

hi A HashTable collection stores a (Key Value) pair and uses the Key to hash and obtain the storage location. The Key is immutable and cannot have duplicate entries in the HashTable. This sample uses several instances of a simple Person class to store in a HashTable. The last name is used as the Key. hope this help.

Vulpes · Answer

When you add a key and value to a Hashtable then they're stored internally in something called a bucket. This is a nested struct within the Hashtable class which (courtesy of Redgate Reflector) looks like this: [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] private struct bucket { public object key; public object val; public int hash_coll; } Notice that both the key and value are stored as 'object' regardless of their actual type. Internally the Hashtable maintains an array of these buckets and which bucket the key/value pair goes into depends on the hash value of the key. For more detail on how all this works I'd read the MSDN docs for the Hashtable class: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.collections.hashtable.aspx Contrary to what it says there the key/value pairs are not actually stored in DictionaryEntry objects but these objects are created when the Hashtable needs to be iterated.