Is method hiding ever a good idea

Question

In C# the new modifier can be used to hide a base class method without overriding the base class method.

I\'ve never encountered a situation where hidin

Answer 1

There are rare, but very good, reasons to use method hiding. Eric Lippert posted a great example on his blog:

interface IEnumerable<T> : IEnumerable { 
  new IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator(); 
}

However, I think hiding should be the exception, and only used sparingly.

Answer 2

The most common example I can think of here is things like DbCommand vs SqlCommand; the concrete types (SqlCommand etc) generally do a lot of method hiding to make the return types of properties / methods display the correct implementation type. This is because the related objects themselves have additional (implementation-specific) features, and the caller doesn't want to have to cast every time they call do anything.