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CA2226: Operators should have symmetrical overloads

  • Article
Property Value
Rule ID CA2226
Title Operators should have symmetrical overloads
Category Usage
Fix is breaking or non-breaking Non-breaking
Enabled by default in .NET 8 No

Cause

A type implements the equality or inequality operator and does not implement the opposite operator.

By default, this rule only looks at externally visible types, but this is configurable.

Rule description

There are no circumstances where either equality or inequality is applicable to instances of a type, and the opposite operator is undefined. Types typically implement the inequality operator by returning the negated value of the equality operator.

The C# compiler issues an error for violations of this rule.

How to fix violations

To fix a violation of this rule, implement both the equality and inequality operators, or remove the one that's present.

When to suppress warnings

Do not suppress a warning from this rule. If you do, your type will not work in a manner that's consistent with .NET.

Configure code to analyze

Use the following option to configure which parts of your codebase to run this rule on.

You can configure this option for just this rule, for all rules it applies to, or for all rules in this category (Usage) that it applies to. For more information, see Code quality rule configuration options.

Include specific API surfaces

You can configure which parts of your codebase to run this rule on, based on their accessibility. For example, to specify that the rule should run only against the non-public API surface, add the following key-value pair to an .editorconfig file in your project:

dotnet_code_quality.CAXXXX.api_surface = private, internal