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Asked: 2026-05-11T03:18:43+00:00

I’ve got a philosophical programming problem. Let’s say I have a class named Employees.

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I’ve got a philosophical programming problem. Let’s say I have a class named Employees. Employees has business members that get set from a dataTable. In order to fill this, I use a method that takes an instance of the employee class, loops through a dataTable, and sets the members of the instance passed into it. For instance:

public void GetEmployees(objEmployee) {   //the function I am calling returns a dataTable of all the employees in the db.   dim dt as DataTable = dbEmployees.GetEmployees();      foreach(DataRow drow in dt.rows)       {         objEmployee.Name = drow['Name'].ToString();         objEmployee.ID = drow['ID'].ToString();      } }

Then I would call the code like this in my UI logic:

public void GetEmployees() {    Employees employee = new Employees();     employee.GetEmployees(employee); }

My question is, is it acceptable to pass in my class instance into a method and change the properties like I am doing, or would it be more object-oriented to do it through a function like this:

 public Employees GetEmployees()   {      Employees objEmployee = new Employees();    //the function I am calling returns a dataTable of all the employees in the db.   dim dt as DataTable = dbEmployees.GetEmployees();      foreach(DataRow drow in dt.rows)       {         objEmployee.Name = drow['Name'].ToString();         objEmployee.ID = drow['ID'].ToString();      }    return objEmployee   }

And then I would call it like this:

private void GetEmployees() {  Employees employee;  employee = employee.GetEmployees(); }

Is there any advantage of using a function over a method? Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Both things are methods (also known as functions). The difference is that the first one ‘returns by reference’ while the second one ‘returns a reference’.

    There is no advantage in returning by reference in C# because in the simpler, natural case where you merely return a reference, no copying is done (unlike in C++).

    Returning a reference is, thus, to be always preferred as it’s the easiest, and it allows great syntactic flexibility at the call site (such as nesting expressions: manager.Fire(GetEmployee()) without the need for a separate statement).

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