Use cases for boxing a value type in C#?

Question

There are cases when an instance of a value type needs to be treated as an instance of a reference type. For situations like this, a value type instance can be converted into a reference type instance through a process called boxing. When a value type instance is boxed, storage is allocated on the heap and the instance's value is copied into that space. A reference to this storage is placed on the stack. The boxed value is an object, a reference type that contains the contents of the value type instance.

Understanding .NET's Common Type System

In Wikipedia there is an example for Java. But in C#, what are some cases where one would have to box a value type? Or would a better/similar question be, why would one want to store a value type on the heap (boxed) rather than on the stack?

Answer 1

In general, you typically will want to avoid boxing your value types.

However, there are rare occurances where this is useful. If you need to target the 1.1 framework, for example, you will not have access to the generic collections. Any use of the collections in .NET 1.1 would require treating your value type as a System.Object, which causes boxing/unboxing.

There are still cases for this to be useful in .NET 2.0+. Any time you want to take advantage of the fact that all types, including value types, can be treated as an object directly, you may need to use boxing/unboxing. This can be handy at times, since it allows you to save any type in a collection (by using object instead of T in a generic collection), but in general, it is better to avoid this, as you're losing type safety. The one case where boxing frequently occurs, though, is when you're using Reflection - many of the calls in reflection will require boxing/unboxing when working with value types, since the type is not known in advance.