.NET deep clone - IsDirty check using IsClone<T>

Those of you that read my colleague Anders Norås' blog may have tried the deep clone using serialization method (see also article at MSDN Mag). This is really useful e.g. when implementing undo, transactions, and other mechanisms that need to make copies of objects.

[UPDATE] Refer to this post for a faster IsDirty check and more reliable IsClone method: IsClone using custom formatter.

Another useful appliance of the clone method is for implementing an IsDirty property in your business entity objects or in other areas of your application. I have implemented an IsClone method that checks whether two objects are identical or not:

public static bool IsClone<T>(T sourceA, T sourceB)
{
IFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
Stream streamA = new MemoryStream();
Stream streamB = new MemoryStream();

formatter.Serialize(streamA, sourceA);
formatter.Serialize(streamB, sourceB);

if(streamA.Length != streamB.Length) return false;

streamA.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
streamB.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);

byte[] hashA = new System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider().ComputeHash(streamA);
byte[] hashB = new System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider().ComputeHash(streamB);

for (int i = 0; i < 16; i++)
{
if (hashA[i] != hashB[i]) return false;
}

//if here, objects have same hash = are equal
return true;
}

The "source" objects must of course be deep serializable. The method uses hashing to achieve good performance. The compare using MD5 is based on code by Corrado Cavalli for fast comparison of byte arrays.