Design Patterns in .NET: Reusable Approaches in C# and F# for Object-Oriented Software Design

Part IIIStructural Patterns

Structural Patterns

As the name suggests, structural patterns are all about setting up the structure of your application so as to improve SOLID conformance as well as general usability and maintainability of your code.

When it comes to determining the structure of an object, we can apply three fairly well-known methods:

• Inheritance: an object automagically acquires all members of the base class or classes. To allow instantiation, the object must implement every abstract member from its parent; if it does not, it is abstract and cannot be created (but you can inherit from it).

• Composition: This generally implies that the child cannot exist without the parent. This is typically implemented with nested classes. For example, ...