What is a virtual member?

We can’t talk about virtual members without referring to polymorphism. In fact, a function, property, indexer or event in a base class marked as virtual will allow override from a derived class. By default, members of a class are non-virtual and cannot be marked as that if static, abstract, private, or override modifiers.

For example, let’s consider the ToString() method in System.Object. Because this method is a member of System.Object it’s inherited in all classes and will provide the ToString() methods to all of them.

namespace VirtualMembersArticle
{
    public class Company
    {
        public string Name { get; set; }
    }
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Company company = new Company() { Name = "Microsoft" };
            Console.WriteLine($"{company.ToString()}");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }   
    }
}

The output of the previous code is:

VirtualMembersArticle.Company

Let’s consider that we want to change the standard behavior of the ToString() methods inherited from System.Object in our Company class. To achieve this goal it’s enough to use the override keyword to declare another implementation of that method.

public class Company
{
    …