The term abstraction is used to hide certain details and showing only essential information to the user. The abstract modifier indicates that the class or member has a missing or incomplete implementation.
abstract modifier can be used with classes, methods, properties, indexers, and events.abstract modifier is used in a class declaration, then it is intended only to be a base class of other classes, and it cannot be instantiated on its own.abstract modifier in a method or property declaration to indicate that the method or property does not contain implementation.Let's have a look at the following simple example.
public abstract class Shape
{
public abstract double CalculateArea();
}
We have declared the Shape class as an abstract. It contains a single method CalculateArea() which is also abstract. So it means that we now need to inherit the Shape class and provide the implementation for the CalculateArea() method.
public class Circle : Shape
{
public double Radius { get; set; }
public Circle(double radius)
{
Radius = radius;
}
public override double CalculateArea()
{
return (3.14) * Math.Pow(Radius, 2);
}
}
public class Rectangle : Shape
{
public double Height { get; set; }
public double Width { get; set; }
public Rectangle(double height, double width)
{
Height = height;
Width = width;
}
public override double CalculateArea()
{
return Height * Width;
}
}
As you can see we have provided an implementation for the CalculateArea() abstract method in both child classes Circle and Rectangle with their implementation by calculating the area of circle and rectangle respectively.
Now we can create Circle and Rectangle objects and assign them to Shape instances, but we cannot create an object of the Shape class, because it is an abstract class.
Shape circle = new Circle(2.5);
Shape rectangle = new Rectangle(4.75, 6.25);
Console.WriteLine("The area of the circle is " + circle.CalculateArea());
Console.WriteLine("The area of the rectangle is " + rectangle.CalculateArea());
You can see that both objects can call the CalculateArea() but the right version of the CalculateArea() method is not being determined at compile time but determined at runtime.
Let's run the above code and you will see the following output.
The area of the circle is 19.625
The area of the rectangle is 29.6875
All the examples related to the abstract class are available in the AbstractClass.cs file of the source code. Download the source code and try out all the examples for better understandings.