I'm having trouble creating copies of my class instances from a dictionary of templates. It appears that MemberwiseClone() leaves some fields referenced to the dictionary's template fields. I'd like to be able to see if that's so in a convenient way, like Visual Studio's DataTips provide.
Is there a way to find out if an instance of a reference type object (or its fields) is referencing another instance of the same type (after memberwise cloning)?
The rule is that any value type will be copied and any reference type will only copy the reference. It is a shallow copy.
If that is not the behaviour that you want then you need to roll your own clone method.
You are probably talking about a deep copy, in which case this will tell you what you need to know: How do you do a deep copy of an object in .NET (C# specifically)?
As for counting the number of references to an instance, Eric Lippert says that C# does not do reference counting C# - Get number of references to object so again you would have to roll your own. But I don't think that is what you want to do.