What is an example of “this” assignment in C#?

Question

Does anybody have useful example of this assignment inside a C# method? I have been asked for it once during job interview, and I am still interested in answer

Answer 1

I know this question has long been answered and discussion has stopped, but here's a case I didn't see mentioned anywhere on the interwebs and thought it may be useful to share here.

I've used this to maintain immutability of members while still supporting serialization. Consider a struct defined like this:

public struct SampleStruct : IXmlSerializable
{
    private readonly int _data;

    public int Data { get { return _data; } }

    public SampleStruct(int data)
    {
         _data = data;
    }

    #region IXmlSerializableMembers

    public XmlSchema GetSchema() { return null; }

    public void ReadXml(XmlReader reader)
    {
        this = new SampleStruct(int.Parse(reader.ReadString()));
    }

    public void WriteXml(XmlWriter writer
    {
        writer.WriteString(data.ToString());
    }

    #endregion
}

Since we're allowed to overwrite this, we can maintain the immutability of _data held within a single instance. This has the added benefit of when deserializing new values you're guaranteed a fresh instance, which is sometimes a nice guarantee! }