Object-Oriented Programming with C# 2.0

Summary

If you already come to the universe of .NET from another object-oriented language, this chapter may have been more of a quick compare and contrast between your current language of choice and C#. On the other hand, if you are exploring OOP for the first time, you may have found many of the concepts presented here a bit confounding. Fear not; as you work through the remainder of this book, you will have have numerous opportunities to solidify the concepts presented here.

This chapter began with a review of the pillars of OOP: encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. Encapsulation services can be accounted for using traditional accessor/mutator methods, type properties, or read-only public fields. Inheritance under C# could not be any simpler, given that the language does not provide a specific keyword, but rather makes use of the simple colon operator. Last but not least, you have polymorphism, which is supported via the abstract, virtual, override, and new keywords.