Does C# support multiple inheritance?

A colleague and I are having a bit of an argument over multiple inheritance. I'm saying it's not supported and he's saying it is. So, I thought that I'd ask the brainy bunch on the net.

Solution 1:

Sorry, you cannot inherit from multiple classes. You may use interfaces or a combination of one class and interface(s), where interface(s) should follow the class name in the signature.

interface A { }
interface B { }
class Base { }
class AnotherClass { }

Possible ways to inherit:

class SomeClass : A, B { } // from multiple Interface(s)
class SomeClass : Base, B { } // from one Class and Interface(s)

This is not legal:

class SomeClass : Base, AnotherClass { }

Solution 2:

Nope, use interfaces instead! ^.^

Solution 3:

Multiple inheritance is not supported in C#.

But if you want to "inherit" behavior from two sources why not use the combination of:

• Composition
• Dependency Injection

There is a basic but important OOP principle that says: "Favor composition over inheritance".

You can create a class like this:

public class MySuperClass
{
    private IDependencyClass1 mDependency1;
    private IDependencyClass2 mDependency2;

    public MySuperClass(IDependencyClass1 dep1, IDependencyClass2 dep2)
    {
        mDependency1 = dep1;
        mDependency2 = dep2;
    }

    private void MySuperMethodThatDoesSomethingComplex()
    {
        string s = mDependency1.GetMessage();
        mDependency2.PrintMessage(s);
    }
}

As you can see the dependecies (actual implementations of the interfaces) are injected via the constructor. You class does not know how each class is implemented but it knows how to use them. Hence, a loose coupling between the classes involved here but the same power of usage.

Today's trends show that inheritance is kind of "out of fashion".

Solution 4:

C# 3.5 or below does not support the multiple inheritance, but C# 4.0 could do this by using, as I remembered, Dynamics.