Developer's Corner

When data is moved across a network, the recipient might require a verification to ensure that data has not been modified after send. For example, in a client/server scenario where a client application sends some updates to a remote database via a web service, the web service might need to verify whether the data has not been modified while travelling across the network, either due to corruption or because somebody changed them. A simple way to implement such kind of verification is utilizing hashing.

2009.01.30 - Updated in order to clarify about immutability.
The readonly modifier is used to declare an instance-specific constant data member which can be initialized in the class constructor and is not limited to compiler-time constants only.