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Is Struct A Value Type Or Reference Type

Last week someone asked me a question - is struct a value type or reference type? The answer was simple – value type. Another follow up question was how can we prove that?

I have given him the answer with an example which I would also like to share with you.

If you browse this MSDN link - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/s1ax56ch.aspx, it says – ‘Assigning one value type variable to another copies the contained value. This differs from the assignment of reference type variables, which copies a reference to the object but not the object itself.’

Let me work on the code. First of all create a struct.

public struct Book {

}

Please note that I have not declared any variable or method inside the struct. Now we will write a code to check if the struct is value type or not.

Book a = new Book();
Book b = a;
if (Object.ReferenceEquals(a, b)) {
	Console.WriteLine("Both objects are pointing to same location");
}
else {
	Console.WriteLine("Both objects are pointing to different location");
}

In the code above we have declared an object of the struct ‘Book’ and then assigned the object ‘a’ to ‘b’ (which is another struct).

Now run the code.

Click to Enlarge

When assignment is done from one struct to another, only value gets copied and references are different so we can say that struct is a value type.

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Friday, April 24, 2015

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