#67 – Default Behavior for Reference Type Equality

For reference types, a default equality check normally checks to see if the references are pointing to the exact same object–rather than checking to see if the objects pointed to are equivalent.

Suppose we have a Person type that has a constructor that takes Name and Age values.

 public class Person
 {
     public string Name { get; set; }
     public uint Age { get; set; }

     public Person(string name, uint age)
     {
         Name = name;
         Age = age;
     }
  }

Now suppose that we create two instances of the Person object with the same values for Name and Age.  The code fragment below shows what happens when we check to see if the resulting objects are equal.

 Person p1 = new Person("Sean", 46);
 Person p2 = new Person("Sean", 46);

 bool b = (p1 == p2);    // False, because p1 and p2 point to different objects