Summary


This chapter began with a discussion of how to define custom value types. One of the key guidelines that emerge is to create immutable value types. Boxing also was part of the value type discussion.

The idiosyncrasies introduced by boxing are subtle, and the vast majority of them lead to issues at execution time rather than at compile time. Although it is important to know about these in order to try to avoid them, in many ways, focused attention on the potential pitfalls overshadows the usefulness and performance advantages of value types. Programmers should not be overly concerned about using value types. Value types permeate virtually every chapter of this book, and yet the idiosyncrasies do not. I have staged the code surrounding each issue to demonstrate the concern, but in reality, these types of patterns rarely occur. The key to avoiding most of them is to follow the guideline of not creating mutable value types; this is why you don't encounter many of them within the primitive types.

Perhaps the only issue to occur with some frequency is repetitive boxing operations within loops. However, C# 2.0 greatly reduces the chance of this with the addition of generics, and even without that, performance is rarely affected enough to warrant avoidance until a particular algorithm with boxing is identified as a delay.

Furthermore, custom structs (value types) are relatively rare. They obviously play an important role within C# development, but when compared to the number of classes, custom structs are rare and most frequently are defined in frameworks targeted at interoperating with managed code or a particular problem space.

In addition to demonstrating structs, this chapter introduced enums. This is a standard construct available in most programming languages, and it deserves prominent consideration if you want to improve API usability and code readability.

The next chapter highlights more guidelines to creating well-formed types, both structs and otherwise. It begins by looking at overriding the virtual members of objects and defining operator-overloading methods. These two topics apply to both structs and classes, but they are somewhat more critical in completing a struct definition and making it well formed.




Essential C# 2.0
Essential C# 2.0
ISBN: 0321150775
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 185

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