Question

I’m moving from PHP to C#.

In PHP it was simple and straightforward to use abstract classes to create a “cascading override” pattern, basically “the base class method will take care of it unless the inheriting class has a method with the same signature“.

In C#, however, I just spent about 20 minutes trying out various combinations of the keywords new, virtual, abstract, and override in the base and inheriting classes until I finally got the right combination which does this simple cascading override pattern.

So even those the code below works the way I want it, these added keywords suggest to me that C# can do much more with abstract classes. I’ve looked up examples of these keywords and understand basically what they do, but still can’t imagine a real scenario in which I would use them other than this simple “cascading override” pattern. What are some real world ways that you implement these keywords in your day-to-day programming?

code that works:

using System;

namespace TestOverride23433
{
    public class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string[] dataTypeIdCodes = { "line", "wn" };
            for (int index = 0; index < dataTypeIdCodes.Length; index++)
            {
                DataType dataType = DataType.Create(dataTypeIdCodes[index]);
                Console.WriteLine(dataType.GetBuildItemBlock());
            }

            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }

    public abstract class DataType
    {
        public static DataType Create(string dataTypeIdCode)
        {
            switch (dataTypeIdCode)
            {
                case "line":
                    return new DataTypeLine();
                case "wn":
                    return new DataTypeWholeNumber();
                default:
                    return null;
            }
        }

        //must be defined as virtual
        public virtual string GetBuildItemBlock()
        {
            return "GetBuildItemBlock executed in the default datatype class";
        }
    }

    public class DataTypeLine : DataType
    {
        public DataTypeLine()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("DataTypeLine just created.");
        }
    }

    public class DataTypeWholeNumber : DataType
    {
        public DataTypeWholeNumber()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("DataTypeWholeNumber just created.");
        }

        //new public override string GetBuildItemBlock()  //base method is erroneously executed
        //public override string GetBuildItemBlock() //gets error "cannot override inherited member because it is not marked virtual, abstract, or override"
        public override string GetBuildItemBlock()
        {
            return "GetBuildItemBlock executed in the WHOLENUMBER class.";
        }
    }

}

Answer 1

virtual/override is the core polymorphism pair; sounds like you’ve already cracked these

abstract is like virtual, but there is no sensible base implementation; use-cases: perhaps a Stream, where it is necessary for the actual implementation to do something with the bytes. This forces the class to be abstract

new should usually be avoided; it breaks polymorphism… the most common case is to re-expose with a more specific signature / return-type (perhaps in a sealed class, since it doesn’t get prettier up the chain…) – see SqlConnection.CreateCommand (vs DbConnection.CreateCommand), or (perhaps more notably) IEnumerator<T>.Current (vs IEnumerator.Current)