Another interesting question from StackOverflow. That thing is a gold mine for blog topics. Consider the following: class B { public int X() { return 123; } } class D : B { new protected int X() { return 456; } } class E : D { public int Y() { return X(); } // returns 456 } class P { public static...

Today, another entertaining question from StackOverflow . Presented again as a dialogue, as is my wont. The specification says " even though constants are considered static members, a constant-declaration neither requires nor allows a static modifier ." Why was the decision made to not force constants...

Here’s a crazy-seeming but honest-to-goodness real customer scenario that got reported to me recently. There are three DLLs involved, Alpha.DLL, Bravo.DLL and Charlie.DLL. The classes in each are: public class Alpha // In Alpha.DLL { public virtual void M() { Console.WriteLine("Alpha"); } } public class...

Reader Jesse McGrew asks an excellent follow-up question to my 2005 post about why you cannot access a protected member from a derived class . (You probably want to re-read that post in order to make sense of this one.) I want to be clear in my terminology, so I’m going to define some terms. Suppose...

As I said earlier , we hate causing breaking changes in our product, the C# compiler, because they cause our customers pain. Said customers are also software developers, and presumably they hate causing breaking changes for their customers as much as we do. We want to throw our customers into the...

Hey, I'm back! And in my new location. That was the longest and least relaxing vacation I've ever taken. Fun, yes. Relaxing, no. And to top it off, my kitchen is not done yet. We're shooting for being able to run water tonight and actually use appliances by tomorrow night, but we'll see how it goes...