Question

I strongly believe that, reading code and reading good code is key to great programming. If not one of the many.

I had been facing some problems in visualizing and having a “feel” of using inheritance to better my code architecture.

Can somebody give me some link to good code to emulate, where folks have used inheritance in an absolute “kung-fooey ruthless” manner [in a good way]

Answer 1

I strongly believe that, reading code and reading good code is key to great programming

Hard to disagree.

Actually the qestion is pretty hard – becouse there is some alternatives to inheritance, such as composite reuse principle, so sometimes it’s very hard to diside if inheritance is used in “kung-fooey ruthless” manner or there ware some better way to implement the same wich will make code esier to understand/test/make it lossely coupled and so on.
In my humble opinion Enterprise Library Application validation block whith it’s Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Validation.Validator class with all it’s descendants
is a very good example of inheritance, becouse

• concept of validation is easy to understand
• there is good example how to find common in objects of with pretty different nature (i.e. OrCompositeValidator/DateTimeRangeValidator/ObjectCollectionValidator)
• many of us tried to implement something more or less like this, so this background will give more quality for understanding
• this is clear(for me, but I can be wrong:) that inheritance has no alternatives there

You can download source code from codeplex.