Lev Lazinskiy

R1D17 Nose Dive into OOP in C#

I worked through module two of the Object Oriented Progrmaming in C# course on edX.

• C# supports the notion of anonmous classes which seems to make it very simple to create new read-only objects on the fly without having to create the class first.
• Visual Studio has handy #region and #endregion functionality that allows you to make collapsable regions in your code. If you have a file with many lines of code in it, using regions is a great way to keep things organized and also make things easier to look at in the UI.
• C# does not support multiple inheritance.

It is not immediately clear to me, but I suspect that this is only true in the context of a namespace. It seems that C# allows you to “magically” use all members of a namespace without having to import them explicitly.

Abstract classes and abstract methods. You can create “sealed” classes which cannot be inherited. Interfaces are classes without implementation. I feel like a good analogy for this would be header files in C, C++ or Objective-C. An interface is really what an API refers to in a traditional sense (not like REST API). It is a “programming contract” that guarantees users of the implemented class that the functionality of that class will implement everything that is defined in the interface.

In the lab portion of the course we refactored our “school simulator” to have Students and Teachers inherit from a base class of Person.

Tomorrow I hope to wrap up the last module of the course which has to do with memory management and then move on to the last course of the series that deals with data structures and algorithms in C#.