Hi Caitlin:
When harry is 'assigned' to key ( which is object reference, does that instantiate him in a sense?
No. The variable harry is uninitialized and using it in a reference will never cause it to instantiate. In fact, the code you showed should trigger a compiler error on the first use of harry complaining about its uninitialized state.
How is that read? Does the method call return an object of type Classname that you are assigning to var?
Close! The method can return any object of a type that is
assignable to Classname. That is, the object might be a Classname, it might be an object derived from Classname, or it could be an object that implements Classname if Classname is an interface.
hth,
bear