map

Question

what is map in .net

Vulpes · Answer

In computer science generally a map is a collection of key/value pairs. This allows you to look up a particular value given its key which must be unique. Maps do not need to be ordered and when you iterate through the collection the order in which the elements are retrieved is not necessarily the same as the order in which the elements were added. .NET does not have a Map class as such but instead has the Dictionary class or the older Hashtable class. The former is strongly typed and should therefore normally be preferred for new code. Another name for a map dictionary or hashtable is an associative array.