Why doesn't ScriptReference override Equals?

Question

I was wondering if there is a good reason for ScriptReference not to override Equals . It would certainly make life in ScriptReferenceCollection s easier (eg Contains ), would it not?

Answer 1

It has too many properties that may vary to make it viable to use some form of value based equality.

Note also it isn't sealed hence its sub-types may introduce further properties which would invalidate any existing equality code and hence make equality testing even more complex.

Answer 2

My guess is either the framework team forgot, which is unlikely but could occur. Or they just didn't see a need, normally with reference objects you don't override the Equals method unless you are using some kind of entity object that is expected to compare across different references, such as a string or a Uri. Granted it would have been easy to implement this because it only takes two values. So to be honest, I don't know why.