Overrides and Shadows

Nice little inheritance tools there. I have no problem with them, except that I've had to shadow way to many methods on List and LinkedList for my combat tracker.

See, I need to know when my CreatureList (inherits List) and InitiativeList (inherits LinkedList) objects change. Neither base list type does - for that you have to use BindingList.

So I've been using not insubstantial, even if small, time shadowing (actually "new"-ing in C#, Shadows is the keyword from VB.NET) every add/remove method on those two classes to run the base's version and then fire off an event.

Which also leads me to post the following: the difference between overriding and shadowing.

When you override a function implemented by a base class, you change the function pointer for all instances of that derived class no matter what they look like to the outside world.

public class BaseClass
{
 public override string ToString()
 {
   return "BaseClass";
 }
}

public class InheritedClass : BaseClass
{
 public override string ToString()
 {
   return "InheritedClass";
 }
}

BaseClass testOne = new BaseClass();
//testOne.ToString() == "BaseClass"
InheritedClass testTwo = new InheritedClass();
//testTwo.ToString() == "InheritedClass"
BaseClass testThree = new InheritedClass();
//testThree.ToString() == "InheritedClass"

Shadows/new works differently. It only 'overrides' the function pointer if the inherited class is being used as the inherited class.

public class BaseClass
{
 public override string ToString()
 {
   return "BaseClass";
 }
}

public class InheritedClass : BaseClass
{
 public new string ToString()
 {
   return "InheritedClass";
 }
}

BaseClass testOne = new BaseClass();
//testOne.ToString() == "BaseClass"
InheritedClass testTwo = new InheritedClass();
//testTwo.ToString() == "InheritedClass"
BaseClass testThree = new InheritedClass();
//testThree.ToString() == "BaseClass"