Sealing Methods and Properties
In general, it's considered rude to seal classes because it prevents other developers from extending the class through inheritance. However, when you declare a base class it's considered perfectly acceptable to mark some classes as overridable/virtual ... and to leave some methods unmarked. Those methods left unmarked can not be overridden by derived classes that inherit from the base class. Essentially, the base class developer is saying that these methods are essential to the nature of the class and modifying those methods (or properties, for that matter) would distort the class.
But what about the derived class? It's not hard to imagine a derived class that overrides a method in a way that is essential to the nature of the derived class. Sealing the derived class to prevent a new class inheriting from it would be considered rude. However, like the developer of the original base class, the developer of the derived class should be allowed to say that some changes are not allowed.
This is role of the NotOverridale/sealed keywords: They allow a developer to mark an overridable method (or property) as no longer overridable. As an example, here's a CreditApproval method that's overridden a method in the base class but has been marked to prevent any further modifications. First, in Visual Basic:
Public NotOverridable Overrides Function CreditApproval() As Boolean
Now, in C#:
public override sealed bool CreditApproval()
Posted by Peter Vogel on 04/26/2018 at 5:03 AM