I was recently thinking if I really liked to use the Multiple assignment in 'C#' or if it was less readable. In 'C' this syntax was popular as it tended to lead to smaller and quicker code.
So I wondered in C# if the multiple assigment also lead to quicker code. So I quickly wrote some test cases to see which style of code was quicker to execute...

I took a rather simplistic model to profile, in order to make the tests more repeatable and easy to follow.

The .NET code followed the followed the structure:

[STAThread] static void Main(string[] args) 
            int Count1;
            int  Count2;
            int  Count3;
            int  Count4;
            int  Count5;
            int  Count6;
            int  Count7;
            int  Count8;

            Count1 =
            Count2 =
            Count3 =
            Count4 =
            Count5 =
            Count6 =
            Count7 =
            Count8 = 100;
            
			
            DateTime time = DateTime.Now;
            for (long i = 0; i < 1000000000; i++)
            {
                int  x = 100;
                Count1 = 
                Count2 = 
                Count3 = 
                Count4 = 
                Count5 = 
                Count6 = 
                Count7 = 
                Count8 = x;
            }

            TimeSpan span = DateTime.Now - time;
            Console.WriteLine("Time taken{0}", span.TotalMilliseconds / 1000.0);
} 

Test	.NET 1.1 Debug Mode	.NET 1.1 under the debugger	.NET 1.1 Release Mode
Count1=x;Count2=x;.....	7	7	4.5
Count1=Count2=Count3 ...=x;	9.5	9.5	4.5

Results are in seconds
I did test out directly setting the values eg Count1=100; Count2=100; etc as well as using strings. These variations appeared to give similar results. I carried out the same expermiment under .NET 2 and the results were similar just slightly slower in debug mode.
The machine that carried out the tests was an Intel 3.4Ghz P4 running XP SP2 with 1GB RAM.


I guess as ever this proves that it is more important to write readable code that requires the minimum of maintanance, rather than trying to outwit the compiler/CLR.
So would I use the multiple assignment? Probably not as much as I used to, but when it leads to easier to read code then yes.