Filter
Top Products
70 Microsoft Visual Studio 2010: A Beginner’s Guide
Now that you can define a new class, create an instance from that class, and use it, the
next section shows you another feature of classes called inheritance.
Class Inheritance
One class can reuse the members of another through a feature known as inheritance. In
programming terms, we say a child class can derive from a parent class and that child
class will inherit members (such as fields and methods) of the parent class that the parent
class allows to be inherited. The following example will create a Cashier class that
derives from the Employee class. To create this class, right-click the project, select Add |
Class, and name the class Cashier. Listing 3-3 shows the new class and modifications for
implementing inheritance.
Listing 3-3 Class inheritance
C#:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
namespace FirstProgram
{
public class Cashier : Employee
{
}
}
VB:
Public Class Cashier
Inherits Employee
End Class
The C# inheritance relationship is indicated by the colon after the Cashier identifier,
followed by the class being derived from, Employee. In VB, you write the keyword
Inherits, on a new line, followed by the class being derived from. Essentially, this means
that Cashier has all of the same members as Employee. Listing 3-4 demonstrates the
benefits of inheritance.