By logicchild | 5 Apr 2011
Introduction and References
This article will focus on the sorting and searching algorithms enabled via the .NET Framework's Class Library. As such, it assumes that the reader have a working knowledge of generics. The FCL provides several classes, called collections, which are used to store groups of related objects. Along with methods for organizing, storing, and retrieving data, these classes provides methods for sorting and searching. Consider the generic List<T> class found in the System.Collections.Generic namespace and the ArrayList class found in the System.Collections class. Both of these classes have properties that are very similar to C# arrays and, in addition, also come with their own methods for performing efficient sorting and searching. However, one key advantage of using collection classes over conventional arrays is that collections can dynamically grow and shrink as their number of elements change. Arrays, on the other hand, do not automatically adjust their size at runtime to accommodate changes in their initial number of allotted elements unless the one writing the code manually codes in a new array or uses the array class's Resize method. Note that the referenced material contained within this article was obtained from the book “Numerical Methods, Algorithms, and Tools in C#â€, written by Waldemar Dos Passos, CRC Press.
A sorting algorithm is essentially a sort of cookbook containing code instructions for organizing the elements of a list into a well-defined numerical or alphabetical order. A list is an abstract concept consisting of a finite collection of fixed-length entities that can be arranged either in random order or in an increasing or decreasing sequential order. In actual practice, technical documentation asserts that a list is usually expressed in the form of an array or a more advanced data structure such as a linked list. If we are sorting data, we are obviously inputting unsorted data into the computational model. The output is sorted data. Let's look at a basic example of a C# algorithm called BubbleSort:
