Beginning Visual C# 2012 Programming

Chapter 8

Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• What object-oriented programming is
• How to use OOP techniques
• How desktop applications rely on OOP

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

You can find the wrox.com code downloads for this chapter at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9781118314418 on the Download Code tab. The code is in the Chapter 8 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

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 a lot of terminology ...