This section on converting between types is specific to C#. VB .NET handles type conversion very differently and should be taken into consideration if VB .NET is your primary programming language. I’ll be briefly looking into converting between types, Boxing and what it is and implement a conversion operator.

The following code is from a Visual Studio 2008 C# Console application named CreateStruct. The code is from the Program.cs file. It illustrates what we have read until now, in a working application. The output of the Console application when run will be “John Mora (Male), age 32, 1234567890, Home”. If you ran this application and did not have read permissions on C:\boot.ini you would get an exception. The “[Serializable]” attribute allows the Manager class (which derives from the Person class) to be serialized, which will be covered later.

Reference types store an address of their data, aka “pointer” on the portion of the memory called the “stack”. The actual data to which the pointer refers to is stored in an area of memory called the “heap”. Because reference types directly store the address “pointer” to the data rather than the data itself, assigning one reference variable to another doesn’t copy the data over. Instead, it merely creates a second copy of the “pointer”, which also refers to the same memory on the heap as the original.

Value types are variables which contain their data directly as opposed to reference types  which store only a reference to the data stored elsewhere. Instances of value types are stored in an area of the memory called the “stack” where the runtime can manipulate them quickly with minimal overhead.