How .NET collections and generics works?

I am a trainee software engineer, I did self study on collection and generics and reported to my TL. He suggested me to study these things a开发者_如何学编程lso.

Specially in generics how memory is defined for generic type, how IL and CLR works for generic?

Performance of generic over collection, or over boxing unboxing?

I googled but getting confined answer. Can please anybody explain or give any matter(Link) on that to study.

Thanks.

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Design and Implementation of Generics for the .NET Common Language Runtime by Andrew Kennedy and Don Syme talks about the theory behind implementing generics on the CLR. http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/64031/designandimplementationofgenerics.pdf

The source code is available for the .NET Framework, which allows you to debug through System.Collections.Generic. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/01/16/net-framework-library-source-code-now-available.aspx

If you want deeper information, you can read the Rotor (aka Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure) source code, which is the "source available" part of the .NET Framework. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=8c09fd61-3f26-4555-ae17-3121b4f51d4d&displaylang=en

Another implementation is the Mono project. They have an implementation of generic collections and the Mono codebase is open source. http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

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A very nice tool for looking at .NET internals is Reflector. It shows the full C# (or VB, or IL) code of many .NET classes, including the collections.