Beginning Microsoft® Visual C#® 2008

Chapter 8. Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming

At this point in the book, you've covered all the basics of C# syntax and programming, and have learned how to debug your applications. Already, you can assemble usable console applications. However, to access the real power of the C# language and the .NET Framework, you need to make use of object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques. In fact, as you will soon see, you've been using these techniques already, although to keep things simple we haven't focused on this.

This chapter steers away from code temporarily and focuses instead on the principles behind OOP. This leads you back into the C# language, because it has a symbiotic relationship with OOP. All of the concepts introduced in this chapter are revisited in later chapters, with illustrative code—so don't panic if you don't grasp everything in the first read-through of this material.

To start with, you'll look at the basics of OOP, which include answering that most fundamental of questions, "What is an object?" You will quickly find that there is a lot of terminology related to OOP that can be quite confusing at first, but plenty of explanations are provided. You will also see that using OOP requires you to look at programming in a different way.

As well as discussing the general principles of OOP, this chapter also looks at an area requiring a thorough understanding of OOP: Windows Forms applications. This type of application (which makes use of the Windows environment, ...