C# Essentials

Inheritance

A C# class can inherit from another class to extend or customize that class. A class can only inherit from a single class but can be inherited by many classes, thus forming a class hierarchy. At the root of any class hierarchy is the object class, which all objects implicitly inherit from. Inheriting from a class requires specifying the class to inherit from in the class declaration, using the C++ colon notation:

class Location { // Implicitly inherits from object
  string name;

  // The constructor that initializes Location
  public Location(string name) {
    this.name = name;
  }
  public string Name {get {return name;}}
  public void Display( ) {
    Console.WriteLine(Name);
  }
}
class URL : Location { // Inherit from Location
  public void Navigate( ) {
    Console.WriteLine("Navigating to "+Name);
  }
  // The constructor for URL, which calls Location's constructor
  public URL(string name) : base(name) {}
}

URL has all the members of Location, and a new member, Navigate:

class Test {
  static void Main( ) {
    URL u = new URL("http://microsoft.com");
    u.Display( );
    u.Navigate( );
  }
}

Tip

The specialized class and general class are referred to as either the derived class and base class or the subclass and superclass .

Class Conversions

A class D may be implicitly upcast to the class B it derives from, and a class B may be explicitly downcast to a class D that derives from it. For instance:

URL u = new URL( );
Location l = u; // upcast
u = (URL)l; // downcast

If the downcast fails, an InvalidCastException ...