Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

6.7. The Master Parent Class: System.Object

To wrap up this chapter, I'd like to examine the details of the master parent class in the .NET platform: Object. As you were reading the previous section, you may have noticed that the base classes in your hierarchies (Car, Shape, Employee) never explicitly specify their parent classes:

// Who is the parent of Car?
class Car
{...}

In the .NET universe, every type ultimately derives from a base class named System.Object (which can be represented by the C# object keyword [lowercase 'o']). The Object class defines a set of common members for every type in the framework. In fact, when you do build a class that does not explicitly define its parent, the compiler automatically derives your type from Object ...