Question

In my project I’ve found a strange situation which seems completely valid in C#, because I have no compilte-time errors.

Simplified example looks like that:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace Test
{

    interface IFoo
    {
        void FooMethod();
    }

    class A
    {
        public void FooMethod()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("implementation");
        }
    }

    class B : A, IFoo
    {
    }

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            IFoo foo = new B();
            foo.FooMethod();
        }
    }
}

Such code compiles. However, note that A is not IFoo and B doesn’t implement IFoo methods. In my case, by accident (after refactoring), A has the method with the same signature. But why should A know how to implement the FooMethod of the IFoo interface? A even doesn’t know that IFoo exist.

For me having such design is dangerous. Because every time I implement some interface I should check if each method in this interface “interferes” with the base class methods.

If this is “pure C# feature”? What is it called? Am I missing something?

Answer 1

For each member in the interface, the compiler simply looks for an explicit implementation (if one), then a public implementation (implicit implementation), i.e. a method on the public API that matches the interface signature. In this case, A.FooMethod() looks like a fine match for a public implementation. If B wasn’t happy with that selection, it could either new the method, or use an explicit implementation; the latter would be preferred:

void IFoo.FooMethod() { /* explicit implementation */ }