<p>I've seen both done in some code I'm maintaining, but don't know the difference. Is there one?</p>

<p>let me add that myCustomer is an instance of Customer</p>

The result of both are exactly the same in your case. It will be your custom type that derives from
```
System.Type
```
. The only real difference here is that when you want to obtain the type from an instance of your class, you use
```
GetType
```
. If you don't have an instance, but you know the type name (and just need the actual
```
System.Type
```
to inspect or compare to), you would use
```
typeof
```
.
Important difference
EDIT: Let me add that the call to
```
GetType
```
gets resolved at runtime, while
```
typeof
```
is resolved at compile time.