Inheritance is a fundamental principle of object-oriented programming. It allows a class to inherit the behavior, or characteristics from base class to child class.
Let's take a look at an example of class inheritance. The following is the base class Animal which contains a single Name property and a method PrintName which will print the name of the animal on the Console window.
class Animal
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public Animal(string name)
{
Name = name;
}
public void PrintName()
{
Console.WriteLine(Name);
}
}
Here are the two-child classes Cat and Dog, both classes have their own method called Meow() and Bark() respectively.
class Cat : Animal
{
public Cat(string name) : base (name)
{
}
public void Meow()
{
Console.WriteLine("Meow!");
}
}
class Dog : Animal
{
public Dog(string name) : base(name)
{
}
public void Bark()
{
Console.WriteLine("Bark!");
}
}
In the above example, we used the base keyword in the constructor of the Cat and Dog classes.
base(), we can call the constructor of the base class.The following code shows how to use the child class object and call the parent class method.
Cat cat = new Cat("Stanley");
Dog dog = new Dog("Jackie");
cat.PrintName();
cat.Meow();
dog.PrintName();
dog.Bark();
You can see that both child classes objects cat and dog can access the PrintName() method of the parent class as well as their own methods Meow() and Bark() respectively.
All the examples related to the inheritance are available in the inheritance.cs file of the source code. Download the source code and try out all the examples for better understanding.