---
title: "Introduction to inheritance"  
description: "Inheritance is the ability to create a class from another class, the \"parent\" class, extending the functionality and state of the parent in the derive"  
author: "Anonymous User"  
published: 2012-06-06  
updated: 2018-12-01  
canonical: https://www.mindstick.com/articles/946/introduction-to-inheritance  
category: "c#"  
tags: ["c#", ".net", "oops"]  
reading_time: 2 minutes  

---

# Introduction to inheritance

##### Inheritence in C#:

**Inheritance** is the ability to create a class from another class, the "parent" class, extending the [functionality](https://www.mindstick.com/blog/136/using-watermark-functionality-in-textbox-by-jquery) and state of the parent in the derived, or "child" class. It allows derived classes to overload methods from their parent class.

**Inheritance** is one of the pillars of object-orientation. It is the mechanism of designing one class from another and is one of the ideas for code re usability, supporting the concept of hierarchical classification. C# programs consist of classes, where new classes can either be created from scratch or by using some or all properties of an existing class.

Every [programming languages](https://yourviews.mindstick.com/story/1911/7-programming-languages-you-can-learn-for-seo) that supports OOP must contains a provision for implementing Inheritance. And each language has its own syntax to create and use it.

Inheritance is the [basic concept](https://www.mindstick.com/forum/34177/what-is-a-basic-concept-of-date-and-time) of OOPs (object [oriented programming](https://www.mindstick.com/forum/162/object-oriented-programming-oop-s)). The main advantage of inheritance is provide code re-usability.

Inheritance implement by inheriting the base (super/parent)class member to its derived (sub/child)class, which in turn enables the [base class](https://www.mindstick.com/blog/116/base-class-initilization) to access the code of its base class. That means we extend our [derived class](https://answers.mindstick.com/qa/30686/what-is-a-base-class-and-derived-class) functionality by inheriting the base class.

C# is supported only single inheritance. It is not supported [multiple inheritance](https://www.mindstick.com/forum/159471/how-does-c-plus-plus-support-multiple-inheritance-and-what-are-potential-issues-associated-with-it).

For more details: [Click here](https://www.mindstick.com/blog/552/inheritance-in-c-sharp)

---

Original Source: https://www.mindstick.com/articles/946/introduction-to-inheritance

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