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In current versions of C#, to get a strongly-typed collection, you need to define a separate type for that collection. So if you want to expose a collection of employees, you created an EmployeeCollection class.

With generics, it's now possible to just use List<Employee>, and it's also possible to write a pretty simple version of Employee collection as well:

class EmployeeCollection: List<Employee> {}

So, which one is preferred?

My advice is to prefer List<Employee>, as anybody who looks at such a definition will already know what operations are present on it, while it's not clear what operations an EmployeeCollection might provide.

I would switch to EmployeeCollection when I want to add behavior beyond what List<T> provides (I obviously *have to* switch if I want to add behavior).

This also has the added benefit of not cluttering up the program with types that really don't need to be there.