C# 5.0 Programmer's Reference

Appendix F Method Declarations

This appendix provides information about method declarations. A property procedure includes a pair of methods, which are also described here.

Methods

In C# all methods must be inside a class. The syntax for creating a method is as follows.

«attributes» «accessibility» «modifiers» return_type name(«parameters»)
{
    code...
}

The following list describes the pieces of this declaration.

• attributes—Attributes that specify extra properties for the method.
• accessibility—One of public, internal, protected, internal protected, or private.
• modifiers—One of new (hides a parent class’s version of the method), static (shared by all instances of the class), virtual (the method can be overridden in a descendant class), override (the method is overriding a version in an ancestor class), sealed (indicates an overriding method cannot be further overridden), abstract (defines only the method’s signature), or extern (the method is defined outside of the assembly).
• return_type—The type of the data that the method returns. If the method doesn’t return a value, this should be void.
• name—The name you want the method to have.
• parameters—The method’s parameters.
• code—The code that the method should execute.

Use a return statement to exit the method and return a value (if the method returns a value).

Property Procedures

Properties have get and set accessors. The syntax for creating a read/write property is as follows.

public data_type name
{
    get
    {
        ...
        return value; } set ...