C# Design Patterns: A Tutorial

Chapter 5. Inheritance

Now we will take up the most important feature of OO languages like C# (and VB.NET): inheritance. When we create a Windows form, such as our Hello form, the IDE (VS.NET Integrated Development Environment) creates a declaration of the following type.

public class  Form1 : System.Windows.Forms.Form

This says that the form we create is a child class of the Form class, rather than being an instance of it. This has some very powerful implications. You can create visual objects and override some of their properties so that each behaves a little differently. We’ll see some examples of this in the following.

Constructors

All classes have specific constructors that are called when you create an instance of a class. These constructors ...