Hello

The default sorting for string uses String.Compare which is slow because it
uses culture information to compare string.
Better use String.CompareOrdinal if you use english strings only or don't
want culture specific sorting.

Best regards
Sherif

Casting is pretty fast. If you need to box/unbox, that takes a lot
longer.

When you say that sorting 300 strings is "extremely slow", what exactly
do you mean? As another poster mentioned, using CompareOrdinal speeds
things up considerably - on my machine I can sort an array of 300
strings 100,000 times in 10 seconds, which certainly doesn't sound
"extremely slow" to me.