Beginning C# 2008 Objects: From Concept to Code

11.1. How Behavior Affects State

Back in Chapter 3, we defined the state of an object as the collective set of all the object's field values at a given point in time, including the following:

• The values of all the "simple" fields for that object—in other words, fields that don't represent other domain objects

• The values of all the reference variable fields representing links to other domain objects

Table 11-1 repeats the list of the Student class fields from Chapter 6, adding a column to indicate which category each field falls into.

Table 11.1. Student Class Fields

Field Name	Data Type	Represents Link(s) to an SRS Domain Object?
name	string	No
studentID	string	No
birthdate	DateTime	No
address	string	No
major	string	No
gpa	double	No
advisor	Professor	Yes
courseLoad