Microsoft Visual C# 2013 Step by Step

Chapter 8. Understanding values and references

After completing this chapter, you will be able to:

• Copying value type variables and classes

• Using ref and out parameters

• Boxing

• Unboxing

Chapter 7 demonstrates how to declare your own classes and how to create objects by using the new keyword. That chapter also shows you how to initialize an object by using a constructor. In this chapter, you will learn about how the characteristics of the primitive types—such as int, double, and char—differ from the characteristics of class types.

Copying value type variables and classes

Most of the primitive types built into C#, such as int, float, double, and char (but not string, for reasons that will be covered shortly) are collectively called value types. These types ...