What's so bad about ref parameters?

Question

I\'m faced with a situation that I think can only be solved by using a ref parameter. However, this will mean changing a method to always accept a ref parameter when I only

Answer 1

A void-returning function with a single reference parameter certainly looks funny to me. If I were reviewing this code, I'd suggest refactoring the BeforeSave() to include the call to Repository.Save() - renaming it, obviously. Why not just have one method that takes your possibly-new entity and guarantees that everything is saved properly? The caller doesn't do anything with the returned entity anyway.