Operator overloading in .NET

Question

In what situations would you consider overloading an operator in .NET?

Answer 1

• I would strongly consider overloading == and != anywhere I override Equals
• I would consider (much less strongly) overloading comparison operators anywhere I implement IComparable<T>
• I would consider overloading arithmetic operators for fundamentally numeric types
• I would consider providing explicit conversions for "wrapper" types (like Nullable<T>)
• I would very rarely consider providing implicit conversions

The golden rule is not to overload operators if the meaning isn't entirely obvious. For example, I think it would be pretty odd to have a + operator on Stream - it could mean "make a writable T here, so that writes to the result write to both" or it could mean "read one after the other" or probably other things.

In my experience it's pretty rare to overload anything other than == and !=.