Do not use IClonable
"I was doing a little work on the Design Guidelines document tonight and I noticed this section that we added recently. I thought I'd post it here for your comments. Where are you using ICloneable today? Do you agree with this suggestion?
1.1 Implementing ICloneable
The ICloneable interface contains a single Clone method, which is used to create a copy of the current object.public interface ICloneable {
object Clone();
}
? Do not implement ICloneable
There are two general ways to implement ICloneable, either as a deep, or non-deep copy. Deep-copy copies the cloned object and all objects referenced by the object, recursively until all objects in the graph are copied. A non-deep copy (referred to as ‘shallow’ if only the top level references are copied) may do none, or part of a deep copy.
Because the interface contract does not specify the type of clone performed, different classes have different implementations. A consumer cannot rely on ICloneable to let them know whether an object is deep-cloned or not.
Note: If you need a cloning mechanism, define your own Clone, or Copy methodology, and ensure that you document clearly whether it is a deep or shallow copy. An appropriate pattern is:
public <type> Copy();
? Do not use ICloneable in public APIs"
I guess we should mark IClonable as obsolete / depreciated...