VB.Net Lists: Add some elegance to your code

It is a fairly common programming scenario to find ourselves with a list of identical objects. In the past, without adequate support from programming languages, we found ourselves writing a lot of searching and sorting code, and that may have put you off using lists in favour of arrays. All that has changed with VB.Net - its implementation of a list makes handling such lists remarkably easy.

For example, given the following class Person:

We can create a list of Person objects and add six people like so:

VB.Net's list mechanism provides us with a number of useful methods. Personally, I find ForEach, FindAll and Sort to be very useful. ForEach allows us access to each item in the list. FindAll allows us to search for objects in the list that match a specific condition. Sort allows us to sort the objects in the list. The following code demonstrates how we might use each of these methods:

And here is the output that we should expect:

Unsorted list
50 Fred
30 John
26 Andrew
24 Xavier
5 Mark
6 Cameron

Age is less than 25
24 Xavier
5 Mark
6 Cameron

Sorted list, by name
26 Andrew
6 Cameron
50 Fred
30 John
5 Mark
24 Xavier

Sorted list, by age
5 Mark
6 Cameron
24 Xavier
26 Andrew
30 John
50 Fred

Lists are powerful and result in fewer, and more elegant, lines of code. Hopefully this short example has demonstrated their ease and you will find yourself using them in your day-to-day development activities.

NOTE: THIS ARTICLE IS CONVERTED FROM C# TO VB.NET USING A CONVERSION TOOL. ORIGINAL ARTICLE CAN BE FOUND ON C# CORNER (http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/).