How did generics influence the design of C# and .NET?

Question

This might be a broad question but this is something I am not really clear and very curious.

Often times for certain problems I hear the reasoning that it was because Ge

Answer 1

I'm almost sure that generics were envisioned from the start. Full well realizing that the job was going to be considerable. The project was headed by Don Syme (of F# fame), his first publication about the design was dated January 2001. The CLR is presented as a given, the paper documents additions to the MSIL, although at the time .NET 1.0 had not shipped yet. That took another year. All and all, it's probably fair to conclude that it took them close to 4 years to hammer this together into concrete shipping software.