Can a Custom C# object contain a property of the same type as itself?

Question

If I have created the following Employee object (simplified)...

 public class Employee
    {
        public Employee()
        {       
                


        

Answer 1

The only scenario where this isn't possible is with a struct; a struct is contained directly (rather than being a fixed-size reference to the data), so the size of an Employee struct would have to be "the size of the other fields plus the size of an Employee", which is circular.

In particular you can't have:

struct Foo {
    Foo foo;
}

(or anything else that would result in a circular size) - the compiler responds with:

Struct member 'Foo.foo' of type 'Foo' causes a cycle in the struct layout

However, in all other cases it is fine; with the issue of initialisation, I'd say: just leave it unassigned initially, and let the caller assign a value via the property.