Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Performance Differences

We said a lot of times that value types store data directly whereas reference ones store only the address of the data. Although you can create and consume types according to your needs, there are some concerns with performances, particularly regarding methods. Methods can accept parameters, also known as arguments. Arguments can be value types or reference types. If you pass to a method a value type, you pass to that method all the data contained in the value type, which could be time-consuming and cause performance overhead. Passing a reference type will pass only the address to the data, so it could be faster and more efficient. There could be situations in which you do need to pass methods one or more value types. This ...