Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET Programmer's Cookbook

Create a Cloneable Object

Problem

You want to create a straightforward way for developers to create copies of an object you create.

Solution

Implement the ICloneable interface, and use the MemberwiseClone method.

Discussion

Many .NET objects provide a Clone method that allows the contents of an object to be duplicated in a new object. The correct way to use this pattern with your own objects is by implementing the ICloneable interface.

The ICloneable interface defines a single Clone method. This method can make use of a protected method that all classes inherit from the base System.Object type: MemberwiseClone. This method performs a shallow copy of all the data in the object. Here’s a simple implementation with the Person class introduced in recipe ...