Overriding is one of the most interesting topic that many software professionals are dealing with quite regularly. Most of the applications we write in .NET or other languages somehow uses overriding. While you write your class, one of the most important thing that you need to consider is overriding
ToString() to ensure that your class does not produce the
“Name of the class” rather you produce something useful on your context. Method hiding is another concept similar to Overriding but is actually different in many respect. But I saw many people does have a little confusion among these two concepts and does not know when to use what. Here is some sample which would help you deal with these concepts easy.
Overriding
Overriding means redefining an existing method that comes inherited from parent class. Say for instance, you have defined a class Animal. Animal can move and eat. So let’s define the class :
public class Animal
{
public virtual void Walk()
{
Console.WriteLine("Animal is now Walking");
}
public void Eat()
{
Console.WriteLine("Animal eats for living.");
}
}
So this is quite a simple class that provides two methods. The first one is Walk which prints a message, and another is Eat, which again prints another message. Now notice, I have made the Walk method of Animal Virtual. Virtual means, the method will be bound at runtime, hence no compile time binding will be produced and runtime object will take over compile time bindings.
