Base Keyword

What Is the base Keyword?

As you already know, the this keyword in C# is used to refer to the instance of the current class.

In a similar fashion, the base keyword in C# is used to refer to the base class members from inside the immediate derived class. The use of base comes into play when we implement inheritance.

Use Cases of the base Keyword

The base keyword is used in three major contexts:

Accessing Base Class Fields

The base keyword can be used to access any non-private fields of the base class directly from the derived class. The base keyword followed by the dot . operator is used in the derived class to access a field of the base class.

Consider a field named price defined inside a Product class to keep track of the price of a product. Another class named as Beverage inherits from this Product class. We declare a field inside the Beverage class with the same name, price, but different value. Now if we want to access the price field of the base class from the derived class, we will then have to use the base keyword.

Let’s understand this using a bit of code.