OOP

Why would I want to use Interfaces?

  • interfaces are a good way of specifying a contract that other people's code must meet.

If I'm writing a library of code, I may write code that is valid for objects that have a certain set of behaviours. The best solution is to specify those behaviours in an interface (no implementation, just a description) and then use references to objects implementing that interface in my library code.

Then any random person can come along, create a class that implements that interface, instantiate an object of that class and pass it to my library code and expect it to work

  • Two teams working on different components that must co-operate. If the two teams sit down on day 1 and agree on a set of interfaces, then they can go their separate ways and implement their components around those interfaces. Team A can build test harnesses that simulate the component from Team B for testing, and vice versa. Parallel development, and fewer bugs.

The key point is that interfaces provide a layer of abstraction so that you can write code that is ignorant of unnecessary details.

You can sort any class of objects so long as you have a way of comparing any two of the objects. You can make any class sortable therefore by implementing the IComparable interface

Interfaces define contracts, and that's the key word.

You use an interface when you need to define a contract in your program but you don't really care about the rest of the properties of the class that fulfills that contract as long as it does

Example 1: There are many different database providers, MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, etc. However all database objects can DO the same things so you will find many interfaces for database objects. If an object implements IDBConnection then it exposes the methods Open() and Close(). So if I want my program to be database provider agnostic, I program to the interface and not to the specific providers.

IDbConnection connection = GetDatabaseConnectionFromConfig()
connection.Open()
// do stuff
connection.Close()

Example 2: If you notice almost all collections implement this interface called IEnumerable. IEnumerable returns an IEnumerator which has MoveNext(), Current, and Reset(). This allows C# to easily move through your collection.

Example 3: When you are designing your own interfaces you just have to ask yourself one question. What do these things have in common? Once you find all the things that the objects share, you abstract those properties/methods into an interface so that each object can inherit from it. Then you can program against several objects using one interface.

When you need different classes to share same methods you use Interfaces



Abstraction 

Abstraction is one of the principle of object oriented programming. It is used to display only necessary and essential features of an object to ouside the world.Means displaying what is necessary and encapsulate the unnecessary things to outside the world.Hiding can be achieved by using "private" access modifiers.

Note - Outside the world means when we use reference of object then it will show only necessary methods and properties and hide methods which are not necessary.

Implementation of Abstraction

To implement abstraction let's take an example of a car. We knows a car, Car is made of name of car, color of car, steering, gear, rear view mirror, brakes, silencer, exhaust system, diesal engine, car battery, car engine and other internal machine details etc.

Now lets think in terms of Car rider or a person who is riding a car. So to drive a car what a car rider should know from above category before he starts a car driving.

Necessary things means compulsary to know before starting a car

1. Name of Car
2. Color of Car
3. Steering
4. Rear View Mirror
5. Brakes
6. Gear

Unnecessary things means  not that compulsary to know for a Car rider

1. Internal Details of a Car
2. Car Engine
3. Diesal Engine
4. Exhaust System

5. Silencer


When to Use Inheritance

Your inheritance hierarchy represents an "is-a" relationship and not a "has-a" relationship.
You can reuse code from the base classes.
You need to apply the same class and methods to different data types.
The class hierarchy is reasonably shallow, and other developers are not likely to add many more levels.
You want to make global changes to derived classes by changing a base class.


Another reason to use inheritance is the advantage of code reuse. Well-designed classes can be debugged once and used over and over as a basis for new classes.

A common example of effective code reuse is in connection with libraries that manage data structures. Suppose, for example, that you have a large business application that manages several kinds of in-memory lists. One is an in-memory copy of your customer database, read in from a database at the beginning of the session for speed.


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