In C# and C++/CLI the keyword sealed (or NotInheritable in VB) is used to protect a class from any inheritance chance (the class will be non-inheritable). I know that one feature of object-oriented programming is inheritance and I feel that the use of sealed goes against this feature, it stops inheritance.
Is there an example that shows the benefit of sealed and when it is important to use it?
On a class that implements security features, so that the original object cannot be "impersonated".
More generally, I recently exchanged with a person at Microsoft, who told me they tried to limit the inheritance to the places where it really made full sense, because it becomes expensive performance-wise if left untreated. The sealed keyword tells the CLR that there is no class further down to look for methods, and that speeds things up.
In most performance-enhancing tools on the market nowadays, you will find a checkbox that will seal all your classes that aren't inherited.
Be careful though, because if you want to allow plugins or assembly discovery through MEF, you will run into problems.
An addendum to Louis Kottmann's excellent answer:
If a class isn't designed for inheritance, subclasses might break class invariants. This really only applies if you're creating a public API, of course, but as I rule of thumb I seal any class not explicitly designed to be subclassed.
On a related note, applicable to unsealed classes only: any method created virtual is an extension point, or at least looks like it should be an extension point. Declaring methods virtual should be a conscious decision as well. (In C# this is a conscious decision; in Java it isn't.)
And then there's this:
Sealing can make unit testing more difficult, as it prohibits mocking.
Some relevant links:
Effective Java, 2nd Edition by Joshua Bloch. See item 17 (requires Safari subscription)
Effective Java Item 17: Design and document for inheritance or else prohibit it (discussion of same item)
Also note that Kotlin seals classes by default; its open keyword is the opposite of Java's final or the sealed of C#. (To be sure, there is no universal agreement that this is a good thing.)
Marking a class as Sealed prevents tampering of important classes that can compromise security, or affect performance.
Many times, sealing a class also makes sense when one is designing a utility class with fixed behaviour, which we don't want to change.
For example, System namespace in C# provides many classes which are sealed, such as String. If not sealed, it would be possible to extend its functionality, which might be undesirable, as it's a fundamental type with given functionality.
Similarly, structures in C# are always implicitly sealed. Hence one cannot derive one structure/class from another structure. The reasoning for this is that structures are used to model only stand-alone, atomic, user-defined data types, which we don't want to modify.
Sometimes, when you are building class hierarchies, you might want to cap off a certain branch in the inheritance chain, based on your domain model or business rules.
For example, a Manager and PartTimeEmployee are both Employees, but you don't have any role after part-time employees in your organization. In this case, you might want to seal PartTimeEmployee to prevent further branching. On the other hand, if you have hourly or weekly part-time employees, it might make sense to inherit them from PartTimeEmployee.
I think this post has some good point, the specific case was when trying to cast a non-sealed class to any random interface, compiler doesn't throw error; but when sealed is used the compiler throws error that it can't convert. Sealed class brings additional code access security.
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/239939/Csharp-Tweaks-Why-to-use-the-sealed-keyword-on-cla
Sealing is a conscious decision that should be considered only when you want to clearly reveal your intent about the structural characteristics of your class. It is a structural choice about your object model. It should never be a decision about performance, or security(**). But more importantly, never about arbitrary limits to your inheritance tree.
I am putting forward this rule of thumb:
A class should never be sealed if you have to think whether it is a good idea to seal it. A decision to seal a class should be obvious to you and will be made even before you write the class's first line of code.
As an example, since we can't derive from them but they look so much like a regular class, we often think of structs as sealed classes. Which is what they are. It is this limitation that allows them to implement value-type semantics since inheritance and polymorphism can only work with reference types. So the "struct class" is sealed because any class that implements value-type semantics must give away inheritance and have its memory managed differently. (Note that this is true of any value-type object in C#, not just structs).
Another example: A code generator may write a sealed class representing a window and all its elements for the user to define the behavior on, because the UI engine expects this class, and no other, in order to be able to render the window.
And last example: A math utility class may be sealed because it is built around truisms, and any extended behavior can never be correct or "work as intended". This is one example that doesn't exactly fall under the rule of thumb above. Never blindly trust rules of thumb.
(**) If performance is an issue in your application, you can be sure unsealed classes are not the reason. Similarly, if you depend on sealed classes to enforce security in your application, the problem must be on your base classes -- what they expose or allow to be extended.
Related
Should a class implement an interface always in order to enforce a sort of 'contract' on the class?
When shouldn't a class implement an interface?
Edit: Meaning, when is it worthwhile to have a class implement an interface? Why not have a class just have public members and private members with various accessor/setter functions?
(Note: Not talking about COM)
No, an interface is not always required - the public members of the class already form a contract.
An interface is useful when you want to be able to exchange one class for another when both offer similar functionality. Using an interface allows you to decouple the contract from the specific implementation. However this decoupling is not always necessary or useful.
Many classes in the .NET framework do not implement any interfaces.
Only use an interface when it is needed.
That is: when you want to have different implementations for a certain abstraction.
When, in the future, it seems that it would be better to have an interface for a specific class (because for instance, you want to have another implementation for the same concept), then you can always create the interface from your existing class. (ExtractInterface refactoring)
Interfaces become more necessary when you are doing unit testing, but it all depends on the context of your development. As Mark said, an interface IS the contract and implementing it forces you to adhere to the "rules" of that contract.
If you are trying to enforce the implementation of certain methods, then using an interface is perfect for that.
There are some nice examples here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173156.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/87d83y5b(VS.80).aspx
An interface, here meaning the code construct and not the design abstraction, supports a basic principle of code design called "loose coupling". There are some more derived principles that tell you HOW code should be loosely coupled, but in the main, loose coupling helps allow changes to code to affect as small an area of the codebase as possible.
Consider, for example, a calculation of some arbitrary complexity. This calculation is used by 6 different classes, and so to avoid duplicating code, the calculation is encapsulated in its own class, Calculator. The 6 classes each contain a reference to a Calculator. Now, say that your customer comes to you and says that in one usage of Calculator, if certain conditions are met, a different calculation should be used instead. You might be tempted to simply put these two rules (usage rule and business rule) and the new calculation algorithm into the Calculator class, but if you do so, then two things will happen; first, you make Calculator aware of some implementation details (how it's used) outside of its scope, that it doesn't need to know and that can change again later. Second, the other 5 classes that use Calculator, which were working just fine as-is, will have to be recompiled since they reference the changed class, and will have to be tested to ensure you didn't break their functionality by changing the one for the 6th class.
The "proper" solution to this is an interface. By defining an interface ICalculator, that exposes the method(s) called by the other classes, you break the concrete dependence of the 6 classes on the specific class Calculator. Now, each of the 6 classes can have a reference to an ICalculator. On 5 of these classes, you provide the same Calculator class they've always had and work just fine with. On the 6th, you provide a special calculator that knows the additional rules. If you had done this from the beginning, you wouldn't have had to touch the other 5 classes to make the change to the 6th.
The basic point is, classes should not have to know the exact nature of other objects they depend on; they should instead only have to know what that object will do for them. By abstracting what the object DOES from what the object IS, multiple objects can do similar things, and the classes that require those things don't have to know the difference.
Loose coupling, along with "high cohesion" (objects should usually be specialists that know how to do a small, very highly-related set of tasks), is the foundation for most of the software design patterns you'll see as you progress into software development theory.
In contrast to a couple of answers, there are design methodologies (e.g. SOLID) that state that you should ALWAYS set up dependencies as abstractions, like an abstract base class or an interface, and NEVER have one class depend upon another concrete class. The logic here is that in commercial software development, the initial set of requirements for an application is very small, but it is a safe assumption, if not a guarantee, that the set of requirements will grow and change. When that happens, the software must grow. Creating even smaller applications according to strict design principles allows extending the software without causing the problems that are a natural consequence of bad design (large classes with lots of code, changes to one class affecting others in unpredictable ways, etc). However, the art of software development, and the time and money constraints of same, are such that you can (and have to) be smart and say "from what I know of the way this system will grow, this is an area that needs to be well-designed to allow adaptation, while this other section will almost surely never change". If those assumptions change, you can go back and refactor areas of code you designed very simply to be more robust before you extend that area. But, you have to be willing and able to go back and change the code after it's first implemented.
This once again comes down to what he means by "interface". There is some ambiguity between the term interface and Interface. When the term Interface is used it means an object that has no method declarations. When the term interface is used it means that you utilize a pre-defined set of functions (whether they be implemented or not) and override them with your logic if necessary. An example would be:
abstract class Animal
class Dog extends Animal
In this instance Animal == interface (or contract) for Dog
interface Measurable
class Cup implements Measurable
In this instance Measurable == Interface for Cup
A class should not implement interface/s unless you want to tell other parts of your program - "This class can do these things (but not specify how exactly it does what it does)".
When would you want to do that?
For example, say you have a game in which you have animals.. And say whenever an animal sees a human it makes it's sound (be it a bark, a roar etc.).
If all animals will implement interface IMakeSound in which there is a method called MakeSound, you will not have to care about what kind of animal it is that should make that sound.. All you'll have to do is to use the "IMakeSound" part of the animal, and call it's method.
I should add that when one reads in a class declaration that it implements a certain interface, it tells him a lot about that class, which is another benefit.
You may not always want an interface. Consider you can accomplish similar tasks with a delegate. In Java I used the Runnable Interface for multithreaded applications. Now that I program in .NET I rely a lot on delegates to accomplish my mulithreaded applications. This article helps explains the need for an Delegate vs an Interface.
When to Use Delegates Instead of Interfaces (C# Programming Guide)
Delegates provide a little more flexibility as in Java I found that any task that I accomplished in C with a function pointer now required incasulation with an an Interface.
Although, there are lots of circumstances for an Interface. Consider IEnumerable, it is designed to allow you to iterate over various collection without needing to understand how the underlying code works. Interfaces are great for when you need need to exchange one class for another but require a similar Interface. ICollection and IList provide a set of similar functionality to accomplish an operation on a collection without worrying about the specifics.
If you would like to better understand Interfaces I suggest you read "Head First Design Patterns".
In the project I'm working on, I've noticed that for every entity class there is an interface. It seems that the original motivation was to only expose interfaces to other project/solutions.
I find this completely useless, and I don't see the point in creating an interface for every class. By the way, those classes don't have any methods just properties and they don't implement the same interface.
Am I wrong? Or is it a good practice?
Thx
I tend to create an interface for almost every class mainly because of unit testing - if you use dependency injection and want to unit test a class that depends on the class in question, than the standard way is to mock an instance of the class in question (using one of the mocking frameworks, e.g. Rhino-Mocks). However, practically it is only possible only for interfaces, not concrete implementations (yes, theoretically you can mock a concrete class, but there are many painful limitations).
There may be more to the setup than described here that justifies the overhead of interfaces. Generally they're very useful for dependency injection and overall separation of concerns, unit testing and mocking, etc.. It's entirely possible that they're not being used for this purpose (or any other constructive purpose, really) in your environment, though.
Is this generated code, or were these manually created? If the former, I suspect the tool generating them is doing so to prepare for such a use if the developer were so inclined. If the latter, maybe the original designer had something in mind?
For my own "best practices" I almost always do interface-driven development. It's generally a good practice to separate out concerns from one another and use the interfaces as contracts between them.
Exposing interfaces publicly has value in creating a loosely-coupled, behaviour-driven architecture.
Creating an interface for every class - especially if the interface just exposes every public method the class has in a single interface - is a bad implementation of the concept, and (in my experience) leads to more complex code and no improvement in architecture.
It's useful for tests.
A method may take a parameter of type ISomething, and it can be either SqlSomething or XmlSomething, where ISomething is the interface, and SqlSomething and XmlSomething are classes that implement the interface, depending whether you're doing tests (you pass XmlSomething in this case) or running the application (SqlSomething).
Also, when building a universal project, that can work on any database, but aren't using an ORM tool like LINQ (maybe because the database engine might not support LINQ to SQL), you define interfaces, with methods that you use in the application. Later on, developers will implement the interfaces to work with the database, create MySQLProductRepository class, PostgreSQLProductRepository class, that both inherit the same interface, but have different functionality.
In the application code any method takes a parameter a repository object of type IProductRepository, which can be anything.
IMHO it sounds that writing interfaces for no reason is pointless. You cant be totally closed minded but in general doing things that are not immediatly useful tend to accumulate as waste.
The agile concept of Its either adding value or taking value comes to mind.
What happens when you remove them? If nothing then ... what are they there for?
As a side note. Interfaces are extremely useful for Rhino Mocks, dependency injection and so on ...
If those classes only have properties, then interfaces don't add much value, because there's no behavior that is being abstracted.
Interfaces can be useful for abstraction, so the implementation can be mocked in unit tests. But in a well-designed application the business/domain entities should have very little reasons to be mocked. Business/domain services on the other hand are a excellent candidate for interface abstraction.
I have created interfaces for my entities once, and it didn't add any value at all. It only made me realize my design was wrong.
It seems to be an interface is superior to an abstract base class primarily if/when it is necessary to have a class which implements the interface but inherits from some other base class. Multiple inheritance is not allowed, but multiple interface implementations are.
The main caveat I see with using interfaces rather than abstract classes (beyond the extra source code required) is that changing anything in an interface necessitates recompilation of any and all code which uses that interface. By contrast, adding public members to a base class generally only requires recompilation of the base class itself.(*)
(*) Due to the way extension methods are handled, adding members to a class won't "require" recompiling code which uses that class, but may cause code which uses extension methods on the class to change meaning the next time it (the extension-method-using code) is recompiled.
There is no way to tell the future and see if you're going to need to program against an interface down-the-road. But if you decide later to make everything use an interface and, say, a factory to create instances of unknown types (any type that implements the interface), then it is quicker to restrict everyone to programming against an interface and a factory up-front than to replace references to MyImpl with references to IMyInterface later, etc.
So when writing new software, it is a judgment call whether to program against an interface or an implementation, unless you are familiar with what is likely to happen to that kind of software based on previous experiences.
I usually keep it "in flux" for a time whether or not I have an interface, a base class, or both, and even whether the base class is abstract (it usually is). I will work on a project (usually a Visual Studio solution with about 3 to 10 projects in it) for a while (a couple of days, maybe) before I refactor and / or ask for a second opinion. Once a final decision is reached and the code is refactored and tested, I tell fellow devs that it is ready for use.
For unit testing, it's either interfaces everywhere or virtual methods everywhere.
Sometimes I miss Java :)
There are quite a lot of deviations in Java and C# languages, one of which I observed was we cannot add variable constants in an interface. Being from Java background I got baffled to see compilation error when I tried this.
Does anyone has explanation why it is so?
A field is an implementation detail of a class and should not be exposed an its interface.
An interface is a way to abstract away implementation details of a class. These two concepts look contradictory and don't really fit together.
You can declare properties in interfaces instead.
UPDATE (after realizing the question was about constants, not variable fields): I think (purely my personal speculation) that Java decided to allow such a construct because it didn't have enum types back then. C# has had enums since the beginning and preferred those to constants most of the time. Moreover, you can create a static class in C# and add everything you like in it and ship it along the interface without any real hassles. Supporting such a construct would just make interface definitions more complicated.
I've rarely wanted to have an actual constant in an interface - they usually make more sense in classes. The practice of using a Java interface to just contain constants (in order to reduce typing in classes that use them) is nasty; I'd only put constants in interfaces where they were related to functionality within the interface itself.
However, on occasion I've thought it would be nice to be able to define an enum within an interface, if that's the only context in which the enum is anticipated to be used. Interestingly, VB allows this even though C# doesn't.
Effectively both of these would be a way of turning the interface into a "mini-namespace" in its own right. However, I can't say I've missed it very often when writing C#. As the C# team is fond of saying, features aren't removed - they're added, and the cost of adding a feature is very high. That means the feature really needs to pull its weight - there has to be a significant benefit before the feature is added. I personally wouldn't put this very high up on the list.
Related thought: it might be nice to be able to define a nested class within the interface, usually an implementation of the interface - either to express its contracts or to act as a "default" implementation for situations where there is such a thing.
and adding constants to interfaces is discouraged in Java too (according to Effective Java at least)
Adding constants to an interface is wrong and should almost never be done. In the past many people declared Interfaces with many constants and then made another class implement this interface so they could make use of the constants without qualifying said constant. This is of course another anti pattern and was only done because people were lazy. If you really want a constant in an interface define a method that returns that constant.
what are the benefits of implementing an interface in C# 3.5 ?
You'll be able to pass your object to a method (or satisfy a type constraint) that expects the interface as an argument. C# does not support "duck typing." Just by writing the methods defined by the interface, the object will not automatically be "compatible" with the interface type:
public void PrintCollection<T>(IEnumerable<T> collection) {
foreach (var x in collection)
Console.WriteLine(x);
}
If List<T> did not implement the IEnumerable<T> interface, you wouldn't be able to pass it as an argument to PrintCollection method (even if it had a GetEnumerator method).
Basically, an interface declares a contract. Implementing an interface enforces your class to be bound to the contract (by providing the appropriate members). Consequently, everything that relies on that contract (a method that relies on the functionality specified by the interface to be provided by your object) can work with your object too.
The main benefit is about code readability, code maintainability and code "semantics".
Code readability: An interface constitutes a declaration about intentions. It defines a capability of your class, what your class is capable of doing. If you implement ISortable you're clearly stating that your class can be sorted, same for IRenderable or IConvertible.
Code semantics: By providing interfaces and implementing them you're actively separating concepts in a similar way HTML and CSS does. A class is a concrete implementation of an "object class" some way of representing the reality by modeling general properties of real life objects or concepts. An interface define a behavioral model, a definition of what an object can do. Separating those concepts keeps the semantics of your code more clear. That way some methods may need an instance of an animal class while other may accept whatever object you throw at them as long as it supports "walking".
Code maintainability: Interfaces helps to reduce coupling and therefore allow you to easily interchange implementations for the same concept without the underlying code being affected. You can change the implementation of a IMessage easily by defining a new class that implements the interface. Compare that to sistematically replacing all references from CMessage to CMyNewMessageClass.
It will help when you try to:
Unit test with Stubs / Mocks
Implement Dependency injection
Solve world hunger (although this unproven!)
Kindness,
Dan
Interfaces provide no actual advantage. Anything that can be done with an interface can, and should be done using other language constructions. Multiple inheritance is oft quoted as the only REAL benefit derived from using interfaces, but I can do multiple inheritance quite easily and clearly in C# - I do it every day. Changing the code without "breaking" the interface is the silliest of all excuses... That applies the same to concrete classes as it does to abstract classes or interfaces. As long as the functional signature does not change, you haven't broken the interface. Doesn't matter where it was declared. Simply putting a functional prototype in a separate file and naming it with an "I" in front buys nothing - except that you end up with twice as many source files to maintain. The supposition that the interface is defined early, and then maintains the contract is ridiculous. Interface methods and their parameters change ALL the time, because everything is never known up-front. That's why MicroSof stopped using them long ago. They had IUnKnown, IUnknown2, etc. It created a mess.
The main benefits of interfaces is mostly related to project design.
If you use an interface:
The consumer of the interface should implement that interface.
Designing bridge patters.
Creating a contract so that user must adhere the rules of the interface.
Can take only interface part (Object) from the main class.
Even class is private, can obtain the interface object from that
Multiple inheritance kind of style.
Need not be should implement, simple go for if implements that means if you want you can implement other wise can drop it..
Cleaner code.
Implementation which changes depends on class can go ahead with interface.
If each class have separate implementation of a method better to go for interfaces. For example IEnumerable in collections.
According to C# Architect, in a simple word it's a contract. Consumer must adhere to it.
An interface defines a contract (things that an object is able to do), while a concrete class (or struct) defines the concrete behavior.
For an example, IList is an interface, it defines the methods that a concrete object has to provide in order to be used like any other object implementing IList. Everywhere an IList can be used, your object that implements IList can be used as well. The way you concretely implement it and the way your object behaves when those IList methods are called is left to you.
If you work in a huge, commercial software house - you MIGHT want to consider the judicial use of Interfaces. Otherwise, you should stay away from them. Same for multi-threading. If I see one more script-kiddie app that spawns 20 threads to write "Hello World" I'm gonna freak. Multi-threading should be completely reserved for apps that require it, usually in a multi-processing environment. 90% of the time it causes more harm than good. And don't bother with the thread highjack / off-topic comments. I don't care. I've been doing this longer than most of you have been alive. Rank has its privileges.
You aren't tied to class inheritance - you can apply an interface to any class. Any class can have multiple interfaces - C# doesn't support multiple class inheritance, i.e. you are providing a good abstraction layer through the interface
An Interface is a reference type and it contains only abstract members. Interface's members can be Events, Methods, Properties and Indexers. But the interface contains only declaration for its members. Any implementation must be placed in class that realizes them. The interface can't contain constants, data fields, constructors, destructors and static members. All the member declarations inside interface are implicitly public.
The way I understand it interfaces are most useful in these cases:
Cleaner division of labor among programmers. Lead programmer writes interface and junior programmer writes its implementation. That makes perfect sense to me. Lead programmer could write pseudocode instead of interface though.
Some specific situation, where you need 2 or more different implementations of the same class, for example interface animal and classes tiger and lion that use it. And even here it doesn't makes much sense, because lions and tigers share some things in common. Abstract class would be better, because if you use interface you have to write common functions in separate classes which leads to code duplication, which is bad.
You write a library and want it to be modifiable by users. So you write interface and its class implementation. User of your lib still has the possibility to write his own implementation class, which may use different technology/algorithm which achieves the same result, but maybe in a faster way for example. This is also the reason why we meet so many interfaces in libs we use, but rarely feel the need to write our own interfaces. Because we don't write libraries.
Here's a question for those of you with experience in larger projects and API/framework design.
I am working on a framework that will be used by many other projects in the future, so I want to make it nice and extensible, but at the same time it needs to be simple and easy to understand.
I know that a lot of people complain that the .NET framework contains too many sealed classes and private members. Should I avoid this criticism and open up all my classes with plenty of protected virtual members?
Is it a good idea to make as many of my methods and properties protected virtual as possible? Under what situations would you avoid protected virtual and make members private.
Your class includes data members; methods that perform basic internal operations on those data members where the functionality should never change should always be private. So methods that do basic operations with your data members such as initialization and allocation should be private. Otherwise, you run the risk of "second order" derivative classes getting an incomplete set of behaviors enabled; first derivative members could potentially redefine the behavior of the class.
That all said, I think you should be very careful with defining methods as "protected virtual". I would use great caution in defining methods as "protected virtual", because doing so not only declares the possibility of overriding the functionality, but in some ways define an expectation of overridden functionality. That sounds to me like an underdefined set of behaviors to override; I would rather have a well-defined set of behaviors to override. If you want to have a very large set of overridable behaviors, I would rather look into Aspect Oriented Programming, which allows for that sort of thing in a very structured way.
When you mark a method with the word virtual, you're allowing the users to change the way that piece of logic is executed. For many purposes, that is exactly what you want. I believe you already know that.
However, types should be designed for this sort of extension. You have to actively pick out the methods, where it makes sense to let the user change the behavior. If you just slap on virtual all over the place you risk ruining the integrity of the type, it doesn't really help the user to understand the type, and you may introduce a number of bugs including security related issues.
I prefer the conservative approach. I mark all my classes with sealed unless I specifically want to enable inheritance and in those (few) cases I only make the required methods virtual.
It is easy to remove the sealed tag if the class needs to change to allow inheritance in the future. However, if you want to change a class, which is already being used as a base class for some other type, you risk breaking the subclass when you change the base class.
My point of view is:
If you can user events, its preferred to protected methods.
Try to avoid protected methods as possible, if not possible then you have to use it ;-).
Choosing protected over private is a deliberate design decision. You are stating that your class explicitly supports having that function used, with all the overhead (design and implementation effort) that comes with that. I would only use protected in those situations where I know that it is necessary, largely because I am doing it myself. (You'll also find comments from BCL developers along the same lines as what I have said.)
The virtual/non-virtual performance difference is irrelevant on any machine that is powerful enough to run the .NET Framework.
No, you can't have "too many." However, the idea that we should just make every protected instead of private or avoid "sealed" at all costs is just silly. I would keep "helper methods" and internal data structures private.
Is it a good idea to make as many of my methods and properties protected virtual as possible?
Not as good idea.
Protected virtual methods provide extensibility points in the framework while adding coupling.
There are more promising techniques to provide extensibility: Composition and Delegation.