In .NET languages, structures are light-weight classes that are simpler, have less overhead, and are less demanding on the CLR. Structures are typically used for creating user-defined types that contain only public fields and no properties. In .NET languages structures, like classes, also support properties, access modifiers, constructors, methods, operators, nested types, and indexers. Unlike classes, however, structures do not support inheritance, custom constructors, a destructor (or Finalize) method, and no compile-time initialization of instance fields. It is important to note that class is a reference type, while structures are a value type. Performance will suffer when using structures in a situation where references are expected (e.g., in collections) and the structure must be boxed and unboxed for it to be used.
