What is OOP and why do you need it?

Ok, this was actually covered in fairly good detail on our sister blog site: Visual Basic Helper; however, the topic pertains to C# users as well as the VB users. Below you will find some excerpts from the original blog posting. You can view the entire posting by visiting: http://visualbasichelper.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-is-object-oriented-programming-oop.html.

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is a concept used for programming. It is like a different way to look at things. The basic principle of OOP is that everything is either an object, a property to the object, or a method of the object. Before we can get into why you need OOP, you need to know a few other things first.

OOP originally was designed to provide an answer to a "software development crisis" in the 1960s. The problem was as the software was beginning to become more and more complex there was no methods around to ensure the quality was maintained. Introduce Object-Oriented programming concept. The concept is that every program contains "objects" and these "objects" would have properties and/or methods. (Notice the use of "and/or"; some objects can have both, or just one or the other). Objects would also be able to 'inherit', 'polymorph', and 'encapsulate' to and from other objects.

Microsoft had finally decided that they had to make a serious effort to be competitive in the enterprise software development market. Their first major step in this effort was a huge improvement; it was the introduction of .NET! The reason this was a huge improvement was because the .NET architecture is based on OOP concepts. A prime example of this is that the entire .NET architecture is a collection of classes. Classes are the foundation of OOP! (.NET will be further explored in a future blog)

Please take a few minutes and read-up on the concepts of OOP and how to use them. If you are unsure of where to begin then there are two resources I would recommend. Wikipedia and Google. In both cases do a search for "Object-Oriented Programming"; if you want more in-depth information than head out to your local bookstore that carries programming reference materials and pick up a book on the subject; you will find many titles available, and you will see just how vast the subject is and quickly realize the importance to learn this.

OOP will be the cornerstone of all of your programming needs and answers.