One of the biggest advantages of managed frameworks\/platforms like Microsoft’s .NET Framework (and it’s Linux-counterpart, Mono), and Java is that you, as a developer, have a choice of not mucking around with pointers. To be totally honest, with Java you’re forced not to – in C#, it’s a choice you have to make.<\/p>\n
There’s plenty of good reasons for not using (unsafe!!<\/em><\/strong>) pointers, but that’s not the issue here. The question is, what if you want something to “point” to another object, and synchronize it’s value automatically, without resorting to unsafe pointers?<\/em> There’s actually a quite simple answer using just a single line of C# code.<\/p>\n Whereas in C++ you could write something like what appears below, in C# you’d have to declare it as unsafe, then jump through a hundred hoops to get it to properly point to a managed object:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You might think it’s impossible to write such code in C# without worrying about unsafe expressions, nullifying the benefits of the GC, and a bunch of other things – but it’s not. In C#, code like this can do the trick of pointing one item to another – but with a catch:<\/p>\n Looking at the code, the catch should be glaringly obvious: you must hard-code the object you’re pointing to! While the above code can be used to bypass the double-casting (a must when dealing with ADO.NET binding sources), you’ll need one property per binding source, which is a major constraint.<\/p>\n You shouldn’t think of this as a pointer so much as it is an alias<\/em>\u00a0– but to an item\/object instead of a namespace or class. It can help you bypass complex castings or long object names (that need to be kept in-sync with the original!), but isn’t really a pointer in that you can’t change the object it points to; a single-use pointer, if you will.<\/p>\n Technically, there is a workaround. By using the immensely-difficult and often-misused on-the-fly compilation features of C#\/VB.NET you can actually create a class “managedPointer” that contains the above code in addition to a function to change the object it points to, but we’re not going to be getting into that here – nevertheless, it’s doable.<\/p>\n DataRowView)(myBindingSource.Current ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the biggest advantages of managed frameworks\/platforms like Microsoft’s .NET Framework (and it’s Linux-counterpart, Mono), and Java is that you, as a developer, have a choice of not mucking around with pointers. To be totally honest, with Java you’re … Continue reading CustomObject *myP;\r\nmyP = &originalObject;\r\n*myP = Some_Value;\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\nMyDataSet.DvdsRow CurrentItem\r\n{\r\n\tget\r\n\t{\r\n\t\treturn (MyDataSet.DvdsRow)1<\/a><\/sup>.Row;\r\n\t}\r\n\tset\r\n\t{\r\n\t\tmyObject = value;\r\n\t}\r\n}\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n