Why does the Equals implementation for anonymous types compare fields?
11:38 25 Aug 2012

I'm just wondering why designers of the language decided to implement Equals on anonymous types similarly to Equals on value types. Isn't it misleading?

public class Person
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }
}

public static void ProofThatAnonymousTypesEqualsComparesBackingFields()
{
    var personOne = new { Name = "Paweł", Age = 18 };
    var personTwo = new { Name = "Paweł", Age = 18 };

    Console.WriteLine(personOne == personTwo); // false
    Console.WriteLine(personOne.Equals(personTwo)); // true
    Console.WriteLine(Object.ReferenceEquals(personOne, personTwo)); // false

    var personaOne = new Person { Name = "Paweł", Age = 11 };
    var personaTwo = new Person { Name = "Paweł", Age = 11 };
    Console.WriteLine(personaOne == personaTwo); // false
    Console.WriteLine(personaOne.Equals(personaTwo)); // false
    Console.WriteLine(Object.ReferenceEquals(personaOne, personaTwo)); // false
}

At first glance, all printed boolean values should be false. But lines with Equals calls return different values when Person type is used, and anonymous type is used.

c# c#-3.0