13.16. Summary

We've just been on a whirlwind tour of the C# language! Although there is much more that can be said about C#, you've been armed with all the essential information that you'll need in order to understand—and experiment with—the sample SRS application that we'll build in the remaining chapters of the book.

In particular, we discussed the following:

• The C# notion of namespaces and how they are used to divide classes and interfaces into logical units

• The object nature of strings and some of the methods provided to manipulate them

• The parent of all C# types: the Object class

• The object nature of Arrays in a bit more depth

• How to use two of C#'s collection classes, List and Dictionary, and the use of a foreach loop to iterate through the contents of a collection

• Some subtleties of variable initialization

• Additional insights regarding the Main method

• Using constructors to initialize an object's fields at the time that the object first comes into being and how to use object initializer syntax to do the same thing

• How auto-implemented properties can simplify code listings

• Inheritance in the C# language; in particular, how the visibility of a member affects the way in which a derived class can utilize that member, how to reuse base class behaviors via the base keyword, and complexities concerning constructors and inheritance

• The nature of object identities in C#, how to discover the true class that an object belongs to, and how to test the equality of two C# objects

• How we delete dynamically created objects to recycle their memory at run time and the role that the C# garbage collector plays in this recycling

With all this C# knowledge at our fingertips, we're now ready to proceed to building the SRS application.

This is a great time to download the code associated with the remaining chapters from the Apress web site, if you haven't already done so! Please see Appendix B for instructions.