Inheritance

A class can inherit another class, which means that it includes all the members, public and private, of the original class, plus the additional members that it defines. The original class is called the base class and the new class is called the derived class. You create a derived class to represent something that is a more specialized kind of the base class. For example, you could define a class Cat that inherits from Animal. A Cat can do everything an Animal can do, plus it can perform one additional unique action. The C# code looks like this:

The Cat : Animal notation indicates that Cat inherits from Animal and that therefore Cat also has a MoveLeft method and the three private variables size, speed, and strength. If you define a SiameseCat class that inherits from Cat, it will have all the members of Cat plus all the members of Animal.