Uniquely Identifying Reference Types in the Debugger

Question

I come from a C++ background, so apologies if this is a non-C# way of thinking, but I just need to know. :)

In C++ if I have two pointers, and I want to know if they

Answer 1

In C# projects, if you right-click on a variable's name in one of the variable windows and select "create object ID", Visual Studio will assign a unique ID to that instance and display it in the Value column. The IDs look like {1#}, {2#}, etc. If two objects have the same ID then they're referentially identical.

In code or in the Immediate window, you can also check to see if two objects are identical by using Object.ReferenceEquals().

I don't believe there's a good way to get an actual memory address for an object in the debugger. I'm guessing that's by design, since an object's location in memory is likely to change during garbage collection in a managed application. Of course you could declare an unsafe block, pin the object, and grab a pointer to it using all the usual C/C++ operators. Then you'd be able to see the pointer's value in the debugger. I wouldn't recommend that as a good habit, though - pinning objects tends to muck with the garbage collector's ability to maintain an orderly heap, which can in turn lead to worse performance and memory consumption.