Pretending .NET strings are value type

Question

In .NET, strings are immutable and are reference type variables. This often comes as a surprise to newer .NET developers who may mistake them for value type objects due to their

Answer 1

An immutable class acts like a value type in all common situations, and you can do quite a lot of programming without caring much about the difference.

It's when you dig a little deeper and care about performance that you have real use for the distinction. For example to know that although passing a string as a parameter to a method acts as if a copy of the string is created, the copying doesn't actually take place. This might be a surprise for people used to languages where strings actually are value types (like VB6?), and passing a lot of strings as parameters would not be good for performance.