Chapter 5: Operators and Casts

Overview

The preceding chapters have covered most of what you need to start writing useful programs using C#. This chapter completes the discussion of the essential language elements and goes on to discuss powerful aspects of C# that allow you to extend the capabilities of the C# language. Specifically, this chapter discusses the following:

• The operators available in C#

• The idea of equality when dealing with reference and value types

• Data conversion between the primitive data types

• Converting value types to reference types using boxing

• Converting between reference types by casting

• Overloading the standard operators to support operations on the custom types you define

• Adding cast operators to the custom types you define to support seamless data type conversions