Interface with basic implementation in C#

February 2, 2013

Today we have simple question:

How to avoid abstract classes by giving base implementation?

The story

Once in a time I was building animation system which was planned to be used in IGWOCTISI project. It happened that I wanted to created some predefined tweens (animated translations) like ScaleTo, MoveTo, RotateBy and so on.

In the horizon appeared a requirement which was pretty straightforward:

public class MoveTo<T> : Animation<T>
		where T : ITransformable

The fact was that my type T not always was able to be some Transformable object.

1st level - abstract class

You may already noticed it. This approach was not good enough. I could add some properties and non-static methods. But there were classes where I would have to extend from two abstract classes, which is not possible in C#.

abstract class Transformable
{
    private float x, y, z;
}

2nd level - use interface!

So why not try with interfaces? Basic multi-language approach.

Yeah. I have only some methods which I would have to implement as static but it’s not abstract. But I can mimic variables by getters/setters.

interface ITransformable {
    float X { get; set; }
    float Y { get; set; }
    float Z { get; set; }
}

3rd level - use Extension Methods!

Use interface! and extension methods.

Extension Methods is a technique to provide methods like they were given in abstract classes (non-static) but can be applied to any other chosen class or interface.

Implementation example

public static class ITransformableExtensions {
    public static Matrix CalculateWorldTransform(this ITransformable t)	{
        return t.Rotation
               * Matrix.CreateScale(t.ScaleX, t.ScaleY, t.ScaleZ)
               * Matrix.CreateTranslation(t.X, t.Y, t.Z);
    }
}

Use example

ITransformable spaceship = getSomeSpaceship();
var matrix = spaceship.CalculateWorldTransform(); //profit!

More on this topic on official page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/bb383977.aspx

Pros and cons

Not much to say. It’s not easy to port such code to Java or other OOP languages. So if you plan such move I suggest to not use Extension Methods.

csharp, gamedev