Collections of socks

By hopping over to India this year for a wedding and missing Christmas, I also missed the one gift that really excites me. Socks. I’m not kidding. Though repeated inexplicable twists of fate, I can never find good socks in stores and it’s a miracle if I can retain a pair intact once they have been gifted to me, which only happens once a year on the day that Jesus was born. So now having missed Christmas, I’m basically screwed to endure cold feet until summer comes along and I can transfer to sandals.

Which brings me to my point regarding the System.Collections namespace in .NET (my feet are cold so bear with me). I always thought the collections libraries in .NET were excellent until I moved away from web application development and started writing thick clients, where efficiently handling ridiculous amounts of data in memory was of the utmost importance. The lack of a simple Hashlist in the libraries made me wonder whether something was missing from the libraries, or whether it was a conscious decision to leave out a programming construct that was not efficient. Wesner Moise’s entry on the topic helped clear up that issue for me, although I’m not sure how I wound up so far back in his archives. Maybe I was distracted by argyle.