Shadowing Inherited Generic Interface Members in .NET: good, bad or ugly?

Question

I know that shadowing members in class implementations can lead to situations where the "wrong" member can get called depending on how I have cast my instances, but with interfaces I don't see that this can be a problem and I find myself writing interfaces like this quite often:

public interface INode
{
    IEnumerable<INode> Children { get; }
}

public interface INode<N> : INode
    where N : INode<N>
{
    new IEnumerable<N> Children { get; }
}

public interface IAlpha : INode<IAlpha>
{ }

public interface IBeta : INode<IBeta>
{ }

I have places in my code that only know about INode so children should also be of type INode.

In other places I want to know about the specific types - in the implementation of my example IAlpha & IBeta interfaces I want the children to be typed the same as their parent.

So I implement a NodeBase class like so:

public abstract class NodeBase<N> : INode<N>
    where N : INode<N>
{
    protected readonly List<N> _children = new List<N>();

    public IEnumerable<N> Children
    {
        get { return _children.AsEnumerable(); }
    }

    IEnumerable<INode> INode.Children
    {
        get { return this.Children.Cast<INode>(); }
    }
}

No shadowing in the actual implementation, only in the interfaces.

Specific instances of IAlpha & IBeta look like this:

public class Alpha : NodeBase<Alpha>, IAlpha
{
    IEnumerable<IAlpha> INode<IAlpha>.Children
    {
        get { return this.Children.Cast<IAlpha>(); }
    }
}

public class Beta : NodeBase<Beta>, IBeta
{
    IEnumerable<IBeta> INode<IBeta>.Children
    {
        get { return this.Children.Cast<IBeta>(); }
    }
}

Again, no shadowing in the implementations.

I can now access these types like so:

var alpha = new Alpha();
var beta = new Beta();

var alphaAsIAlpha = alpha as IAlpha;
var betaAsIBeta = beta as IBeta;

var alphaAsINode = alpha as INode;
var betaAsINode = beta as INode;

var alphaAsINodeAlpha = alpha as INode<Alpha>;
var betaAsINodeBeta = beta as INode<Beta>;

var alphaAsINodeIAlpha = alpha as INode<IAlpha>;
var betaAsINodeIBeta = beta as INode<IBeta>;

var alphaAsNodeBaseAlpha = alpha as NodeBase<Alpha>;
var betaAsNodeBaseBeta = beta as NodeBase<Beta>;

Each of these variables now have the correct, strongly-type Children collection.

So, my questions are simple. Is the shadowing of interface members using this kind of pattern good, bad or ugly? And why?

Answer 1

I would say you've got yourself a pretty complicated scenario there, and I generally try to keep things simpler than that - but if it works for you, I think it's okay to add more information like this. (It seems reasonable until you get to the IAlpha and IBeta bit; without those interfaces, Alpha and Beta don't need any implementation at all, and callers can just use INode<IAlpha> and INode<IBeta> instead.

In particular, note that IEnumerable<T> effectively does the same thing - not hiding one generic with another, admittedly, but hiding a non-generic with a generic.

Four other points:

• Your call to AsEnumerable in NodeBase is pointless; callers can still cast to List<T>. If you want to prevent that, you can do something like Select(x => x). (In theory Skip(0) might work, but it could be optimized away; LINQ to Objects isn't terribly well documented in terms of which operators are guaranteed to hide the original implementation. Select is guaranteed not to. Realistically, Take(int.MaxValue) would work too.)

• As of C# 4, your two "leaf" classes can be simplified due to covariance:

  public class Alpha : NodeBase<Alpha>, IAlpha
  {
      IEnumerable<IAlpha> INode<IAlpha>.Children { get { return Children; } }
  }
  
  public class Beta : NodeBase<Beta>, IBeta
  {
      IEnumerable<IBeta> INode<IBeta>.Children { get { return Children; } }
  }
  

• As of C# 4, your NodeBase implementation of INode.Children can be simplified if you're willing to restrict N to be a reference type:

  public abstract class NodeBase<N> : INode<N>
      where N : class, INode<N> // Note the class constraint
  {
      ...
  
      IEnumerable<INode> INode.Children
      {
          get { return this.Children; }
      }
  }
  

• As of C# 4, you can declare INode<N> to be covariant in N:

  public interface INode<out N> : INode