Difference between shadowing and overriding in C#?

Well inheritance…

suppose you have this classes:

class A {
   public int Foo(){ return 5;}
   public virtual int Bar(){return 5;}
}
class B : A{
   public new int Foo() { return 1;}     //shadow
   public override int Bar() {return 1;} //override
}

then when you call this:

A clA = new A();
B clB = new B();

Console.WriteLine(clA.Foo()); // output 5
Console.WriteLine(clA.Bar()); // output 5
Console.WriteLine(clB.Foo()); // output 1
Console.WriteLine(clB.Bar()); // output 1

//now let's cast B to an A class
Console.WriteLine(((A)clB).Foo()); // output 5 <<<-- shadow
Console.WriteLine(((A)clB).Bar()); // output 1

Suppose you have a base class and you use the base class in all your code instead of the inherited classes, and you use shadow, it will return the values the base class returns instead of following the inheritance tree of the real type of the object.

Run code here

Hope I’m making sense 🙂