Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Deep Copy and Shallow Copy

In the “Understanding Reference Types” section, you saw how reference types assignments differ from value types assignments and how assignments are not enough to create a copy of a reference type. We also provided one basic solution to this problem, which was to create a new instance of a specified reference type and then assign each property of the target instance with values coming from the original one. But this is not enough, both because it is not complete and because it can be good only with small classes. To create a complete clone of a reference type, in the .NET development we can take advantage of two techniques: deep copy and shallow copy. Both techniques require the implementation of the ICloneable interface. ...