Question

I would like to override .Equals and the == operator for a class. I need to check whether there are any equality comparisons in use anywhere for that class at the moment. How would I do this?

Answer 1

In both cases, I would add the overload/override, and then use “Find Usages” (in Resharper), or “View Call Hierarchy” (Visual Studio native). If anything shows up, it will be a change.

Another approach (if neither is available) is to (just while doing this) add [Obsolete] to the override/overload methods you add – then any code that starts using them (i.e. has a change to behaviour) will show up as a warning.

Caveat: if the override (Equals) is part of an inheritance chain that already overrides Equals, note that code referencing the base-class will not appear in any of the above. This includes code using object.