Beginning C# 7 Programming with Visual Studio 2017

9Defining Classes

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• Defining classes and interfaces in C#
• Using the keywords that control accessibility and inheritance
• Discovering the System.Object class and its role in class definitions
• Using some helpful tools provided by Visual Studio (VS)
• Defining class libraries
• Knowing the differences and similarities between interfaces and abstract classes
• Exploring struct types
• Understanding important object copying considerations

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found on this book’s webpage on Wrox.com on the Download Code tab. The code can also be found at http://github.com/benperk/BeginningCSharp7. The code is in the Chapter09 folder and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

In Chapter 8, you looked at the features of object‐oriented programming (OOP). In this chapter, you put theory into practice and define classes in C#. You won’t go so far as to define class members in this chapter, but you will concentrate on the class definitions themselves.

To begin, you explore the basic class definition syntax, the keywords you can use to determine class accessibility and more, and the way in which you can specify inheritance. You also look at interface definitions because they are similar to class definitions in many ways.

The rest of the chapter covers various related topics that apply when defining classes in C#.

CLASS DEFINITIONS IN C#

C# uses the class keyword to define classes: ...