Not sure on the first part but the second part is true. When there is a C# class that both has and doesn't have type information, they are actually completely

Not sure on the first part but the second part is true. When there is a C# class that both has and doesn't have type information, they are actually completely different classes that just happen to share a base name. This really made it painful when they first added generics. If you used generic containers but wanted to call into a library that predated it you hand to transform your data in/out of all the calls to the library. In Java land you didn't have to do anything other then a blind cast on the out side which doesn't even have a runtime penalty. Long term the C# way was probably better but then they didn't have nearly as robust of a library ecosystem when they added generics.