C# 5.0 Unleashed

Declaring Virtual Members

To illustrate the concept of virtual members from a different angle, let’s define another type hierarchy in which we declare virtual members ourselves (rather than overriding the ones from System.Object). A good example is the concept of a Shape that can be queried for its area and circumference. Depending on the subclass of Shape, calculation of those values will differ:

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class Shape{    public virtual double Area    {        get { return 0.0; }    }    public virtual double Circumference    {        get { return 0.0; }    }}

For the time being, we use default implementations for those virtual property getters, which don’t look as if they produce very meaningful values. Later on, after you’ve ...