When can a == b be false and a.Equals(b) true?

Question

I ran into this situation today. I have an object which I\'m testing for equality; the Create() method returns a subclass implementation of MyObject.

MyObject         


        

Answer 1

You pretty much answered your question yourself:

I have also over-ridden Equals() in the subclass implementation, which does a very basic check to see whether or not the passed-in object is null and is of the subclass's type. If both those conditions are met, the objects are deemed to be equal.

The == operator hasn't been overloaded - so it's returning false since a and b are different objects. But a.Equals is calling your override, which is presumably returning true because neither a nor b are null, and they're both of the subclass' type.

So your question was "When can a == b be false and a.Equals(b) true?" Your answer in this case is: when you explicitly code it to be so!