Introducing Queue in C#

Queue:

Queues are dynamic collections which have some concept of order. A Queue is a collection where elements are processed first in, first out (FIFO). The item is put first in the queue is read first. The item in the end is read last.

 Real life Example of queues –

1) Patients waiting outside the doctor's clinic: The patient who comes first visits the doctor first, and the patient who comes last visits the doctor last. Therefore, it follows the first-in-first-out (FIFO) strategy of queue.

2) Queue in the Bank

3) Queue at the bus stand

4) Queue at the Ration shop

Examples of queues in Software systems :

1)      1) Print jobs waiting to be processed in a print queue

2)      2) A thread waiting for the CPU in a round-robin fashion.

 Often there are queues where the elements processed differ in their priority. For example, in the queue at the Bank, Gold card customers are processed before common customers. Here, multiple queues can be used, one queue for every priority. In the bank this can easily be found out, because there are separate queues for Gold card and common customers. You can have an array or a list of queues where on item in the array stands for a priority. Within every array item there is a queue, where processing happens with the FIFO principle.

Implementing classes and Interfaces :

In C# queue is implemented with Queue<T> class in the namespace System.Collections.Generic. It implements the interfaces IEnumerable & ICollection.

 Some useful methods of queue :

1) To create a queue:

Queue<int> p = new Queue<int>();

2) To add element to it :

p.Enqueue(i * 10);

3) To remove element from queue :

p.Dequeue( );

4) To count total elements in queue:

p.Count;

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;


namespace ConsoleApplication17
{
  class Class1
  {
    public static void Main()
    {
      int i;
      Queue<int> p = new Queue<int>();
      for (i = 0; i < 5; i++)
      {
        p.Enqueue(i * 10);
      }
      Console.WriteLine("Total elements : " + p.Count);


      Console.WriteLine("Elements is queue are :");

      for (i = 0; i < 5; i++)
      {
        Console.WriteLine("Element {0}: {1} ", i, p.Dequeue());
      }

      Console.WriteLine("Total elements : "+ p.Count);
    }
  }
} 

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