Polymorphism (C# Programming Guide)

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Polymorphism is often referred to as the third pillar of object-oriented programming, after encapsulation and inheritance. Polymorphism is a Greek word that means "many-shaped" and it has two distinct aspects:
1. At run time, objects of a derived class may be treated as objects of a base class in places such as method parameters and collections or arrays. When this occurs, the object's declared type is no longer identical to its run-time type.
2. Base classes may define and implement virtual methods, and derived classes can override them, which means they provide their own definition and implementation. At run-time, when client code calls the method, the CLR looks up the run-time type of the object, and invokes that override of the virtual method. Thus in your source code you can call a method on a base class, and cause a derived class's version of the method to be executed.
Virtual methods enable you to work with groups of related objects in a uniform way. For example, suppose you have a drawing application that enables a user to create various kinds of shapes on a drawing surface. You do not know at compile time which specific types of shapes the user will create. However, the application has to keep track of all the various types of shapes that are created, and it has to update them in response to user mouse actions. You can use polymorphism to solve this problem in two basic steps:
1. Create a class hierarchy in which each specific shape class derives from a common base class.
2. Use a virtual method to invoke the appropriate method on any derived class through a single call to the base class method.
First, create a base class called Shape, and derived classes such as Rectangle, Circle, and Triangle. Give the Shape class a virtual method called Draw, and override it in each derived class to draw the particular shape that the class represents. Create a List object and add a Circle, Triangle and Rectangle to it. To update the drawing surface, use a foreach loop to iterate through the list and call the Draw method on each Shape object in the list. Even though each object in the list has a declared type of Shape, it is the run-time type (the overridden version of the method in each derived class) that will be invoked.