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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.

How Does Value Type Work?

In value type, assigning one value type variable to other copies of the contained value.

Example

To begin with, create a struct.

public struct Book {

}

In the above code, I have not declared any variable or method inside the struct. The next step is to check if the struct is a 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.

Picture showing the output of whether the struct is a value type or reference type

Click to Enlarge

When the 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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