Are there any good tools to help implement or enforce the proper equals and hashcode patterns for c#?

Question

A very common bug on my development team is forgetting to, or incorrectly overriding equals and hashcode.

While the pattern is simple, there's a lot of boilerplate code that goes into doing this correctly. Implementing IEquatable<T>, IEquatable, IComparable<T>, and IComparable.

While sometimes this needs to be done in a custom fashion, almost always this is simple a checking of types followed by a checking of an ordered set of fields.

In the absence of compiler support (while I hope is coming), can a code generator/analysis tool help with this problem?

What would be idea is to simply tag properties or fields with an attribute (say [EC_KEY] (for Equality/Comparison Key)). Then all the appropriate routines for checking those fields/properties (in lexical order) would be generated (using those field's type's corresponding equality or comparison operators and, of course, natural ordering for primitives)

Ideally, the analysis tool would report as error objects where no tags (or explicit overloads) were found, but could have tags like [EQ_ALL] (to use all fields/properties) or [EQ_IGNORE] to explicitly ignore the class.

Answer 1

The best discussion I've seen about this was by the guy who was the lead developer on Castle ActiveRecord. I've not so far been able to find the original post, but you can read about primary key mapping here. He makes the very valid point that determining equality and deriving a hash code are very closely related to deciding on a primary key for your class. He uses attributes to indicate single or composite primary keys and then the base class takes care of the rest; if you didn't want a base class then you could have some helper object and override equals and gethashcode in every class.

My basic point is go look at the source of Castle ActiveRecord and you will probably get a good idea of how to do this in a nice generic way.

Answer 2

Use Resharper.

1. In the editor, position the caret within a class.
2. On the main menu, choose ReSharper | Edit | Generate Code, or press Alt+Insert.
3. From the Generate pop-up menu, select Equality members.
4. On the Generate equality members page of the Generate wizard, select fields to be compared with the Equals() method.

Here's the original documentation.