Essential .NET, Volume 1: The Common Language Runtime

Cloning

Assigning one reference variable to another simply creates a second reference to the same object. To make a second copy of an object, one needs some mechanism to create a new instance of the same class and initialize it based on the state of the original object. The Object.MemberwiseClone method does exactly that; however, it is not a public method. Rather, objects that wish to support cloning typically implement the System.ICloneable interface, which has one method, Clone:

namespace System {
  public interface ICloneable {
    Object Clone();
  }
}

The MemberwiseClone method performs what is called a shallow copy, which means that it simply copies each field's value from the source object to the clone. If the field is an object reference, ...