The Weird and The Wonderful

public class A
{
  private ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
  private object m_lock = new object();

  public A()
  {
    lock(m_lock)
    {
       list.Add("MyString");
    }
  }
}

There are times that information needs to be collected and distributed around the program.  To aid in the collection of data and 
passing it, Microsoft added collections.  The two most popular are arrays and arraylists.

An array takes its space out of the near heap.  It is very possible to run this out by adding to the array.  Arraylist takes its 
space out of the far heap and in 64KB chunks.  When building the collection, arraylists are the best thing to use for speed.  
HOWEVER, when passing the information from method to method, an arraylist is not the most efficient taking up to 60,000 flops to pass 
the information therefore arrays are faster.

q:  How do we strike a happy medium on this?  
a:  Use both.  Since most of the data that we collect are strings, we can do the following.  Build the arraylist when collecting 
data, the pass the data to an array when collecting is complete.  The following code is a great example on this:

string[] results = new string[arraylist.count];
arraylist.CopyTo(results, 0);
return results;

#define stdcall_api __stdcall