virtual properties

Question

I have used and learned only virtual methods of the base class without any knowledge of virtual properties used as

class A
{
   public virtual ICollection<         


        

Answer 1

In Entity Framework (which I believe your example refers to), your POCO classes are created and wrapped into a proxy class. Proxy class is a descendant of the class that you declare, so your class A becomes a base class. This proxy class is populated with data and returned back to you. This is necessary in order to track changes. Have a look at this article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/query/dd456848

I had a similar problem in trying to understand this and after a few debugging sessions and seeing the proxy classes and reading about tracking changes it made be figure out why it is declared the way it is.