& is the bitwise AND operator. For operands of integer types, it’ll calculate the bitwise-AND of the operands and the result will be an integer type. For boolean operands, it’ll compute the logical-and of operands. && is the logical AND operator and doesn’t work on integer types. For boolean types, where both of them can be applied, the difference is in the “short-circuiting” property of &&. If the first operand of && evaluates to false, the second is not evaluated at all. This is not the case for &:
bool f() {
Console.WriteLine("f called");
return false;
}
bool g() {
Console.WriteLine("g called");
return false;
}
static void Main() {
bool result = f() && g(); // prints "f called"
Console.WriteLine("------");
result = f() & g(); // prints "f called" and "g called"
}
|| is similar to && in this property; it’ll only evaluate the second operand if the first evaluates to false.
Of course, user defined types can overload these operators making them do anything they want.