Copies of objects vs. references to objects.

[lord.zoltar]

Hi, I'm having some trouble with Copies of objects versus references.
My problem is that I have written a printing/reporting system that
takes the DataGridView, and then changes the date-formatted cells to
string-format. This works fine, and the printing is ok, but then when
the CellFormatting event occurs (I have a special procedure to do some
special formatting), I get an exception occuring because I changed the
formatting type during the printing procedure. This has led me to
believe that my printing system is not really getting a copy of the
DataGridView, but is referring to the original object displayed on the
window. I set the datasource for the printing system like this:

Property dataSource() As DataGridView
Get
Return myDataGridView
End Get
Set(ByVal value As DataGridView)
Me.myDataGridView = value
Next
End Set
End Property

I thought that since the Set part of the property uses ByVal,
Me.myDataGridView would be a seperate copy.
How can I ensure that the local object (Me.myDataGridView) will be a
complete copy of the original on the UI, and not a reference to it?

I'm using VB.NET 2005

Thanks in advance.

[lord.zoltar]

haha! It seems that posting on this group is the easiest way to fix my
own problems...

It turns out that I WAS getting a copy (not a reference) of the
original DataGridView object, BUT... that copy contained references to
the same UI controls that the original had. So both of the objects were
referring to the same UI parent object, and when I changed stuff in the
new copy, it messed up crap in the UI parent object. In the end, I had
to copy just the rows and columns to the new object... that was all the
data that I really needed.