Building cloneable objects

ICloneable Interface supports cloning, which creates a new instance of a class with the same value as an existing instance.

The ICloneable interface enables you to provide a customized implementation that creates a copy of an existing object. The ICloneable interface contains one member, the Clone method, which is intended to provide cloning support beyond that supplied by Object.MemberwiseClone.

The ICloneable interface simply requires that your implementation of the Clone() method return a copy of the current object instance. It does not specify whether the cloning operation performs a deep copy, a shallow copy, or something in between. Nor does it require all property values of the original instance to be copied to the new instance. For example, the Clone() method performs a shallow copy of all properties except the IsReadOnly property; it always sets this property value to false in the cloned object. Because callers of Clone() cannot depend on the method performing a predictable cloning operation, we recommend that ICloneable not be implemented in public APIs.

public class Person 
{
    public int Age;
    public string Name;
    public IdInfo IdInfo;

    public Person ShallowCopy()
    {
       return (Person) this.MemberwiseClone();
    }

    public Person DeepCopy()
    {
       Person other = (Person) this.MemberwiseClone();
       other.IdInfo = new IdInfo(IdInfo.IdNumber);
       other.Name = String.Copy(Name);
       return other;
    }
}