Can I force subclasses to override a method without making it abstract?

Question

I have a class with some abstract methods, but I want to be able to edit a subclass of that class in the designer. However, the designer can\'t edit the subclass unless it

Answer 1

As a general rule, if there's no way in a language to do something that generally means that there's a good conceptual reason not to do it.

Sometimes this will be the fault of the language designers - but not often. Usually I find they know more about language design than I do ;-)

In this case you want a un-overridden virtual method to throw a compile time exception (rather and a run time one). Basically an abstract method then.

Making virtual methods behave like abstract ones is just going to create a world of confusion for you further down the line.

On the other hand, VS plug in design is often not quite at the same level (that's a little unfair, but certainly less rigour is applied than is at the language design stage - and rightly so). Some VS tools, like the class designer and current WPF editors, are nice ideas but not really complete - yet.

In the case that you're describing I think you have an argument not to use the class designer, not an argument to hack your code.

At some point (maybe in the next VS) they'll tidy up how the class designer deals with abstract classes, and then you'll have a hack with no idea why it was coded that way.

It should always be the last resort to hack your code to fit the designer, and when you do try to keep hacks minimal. I find that it's usually better to have concise, readable code that makes sense quickly over Byzantine code that works in the current broken tools.