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copied!<p>It is rare, in reality, that you would want to use an array. Definitely use a <code>List<T></code> any time you want to add/remove data, since resizing arrays is expensive. If you know the data is fixed length, and you want to micro-optimise for some <strong>very specific</strong> reason (after benchmarking), then an array may be useful.</p> <p><code>List<T></code> offers a <em>lot</em> more functionality than an array (although LINQ evens it up a bit), and is almost always the right choice. Except for <code>params</code> arguments, of course. ;-p</p> <p>As a counter - <code>List<T></code> is one-dimensional; where-as you have have rectangular (etc) arrays like <code>int[,]</code> or <code>string[,,]</code> - but there are other ways of modelling such data (if you need) in an object model.</p> <p>See also:</p> <ul> <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75976/how-when-to-abandon-the-use-of-arrays-in-c-net">How/When to abandon the use of Arrays in c#.net?</a></li> <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/392397/arrays-whats-the-point">Arrays, What's the point?</a></li> </ul> <p>That said, I make a <strong>lot</strong> of use of arrays in my <a href="https://github.com/mgravell/protobuf-net" rel="noreferrer">protobuf-net</a> project; entirely for performance:</p> <ul> <li>it does a lot of bit-shifting, so a <code>byte[]</code> is pretty much essential for encoding;</li> <li>I use a local rolling <code>byte[]</code> buffer which I fill before sending down to the underlying stream (and v.v.); quicker than <code>BufferedStream</code> etc;</li> <li>it internally uses an array-based model of objects (<code>Foo[]</code> rather than <code>List<Foo></code>), since the size is fixed once built, and needs to be very fast.</li> </ul> <p>But this is definitely an exception; for general line-of-business processing, a <code>List<T></code> wins every time.</p>

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