How to Clone Objects

Question

When I do the following.. anything done to Person b modifies Person a (I thought doing this would clone Person b from Person a). I also have NO idea if changing Person a wil

Answer 1

MemberwiseClone is a good way to do a shallow copy as others have suggested. It is protected however, so if you want to use it without changing the class, you have to access it via reflection. Reflection however is slow. So if you are planning to clone a lot of objects it might be worthwhile to cache the result:

public static class CloneUtil
{
    private static readonly Func clone;

    static CloneUtil()
    {
        var cloneMethod = typeof(T).GetMethod("MemberwiseClone", System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Instance | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic);
        clone = (Func)cloneMethod.CreateDelegate(typeof(Func));
    }

    public static T ShallowClone(T obj) => (T)clone(obj);
}

public static class CloneUtil
{
    public static T ShallowClone(this T obj) => CloneUtil.ShallowClone(obj);
}

You can call it like this:

Person b = a.ShallowClone();