Encapsulation

As I mentioned earlier, encapsulation, sometimes called information hiding, is the ability to hide the internals of an object from its users and to provide an interface to only those members that you want the client to be able to directly manipulate. However, I also spoke of abstraction in the same context, so in this section, I'll clear up any confusion regarding these two similar concepts. Encapsulation provides the boundary between a class's external interface-that is, the public members visible to the class's users-and its internal implementation details. The advantage of encapsulation for the class developer is that he can expose the members of a class that will remain static, or unchanged, while hiding the more dynamic and volatile class internals. As you saw earlier in this chapter, encapsulation is achieved in C# by virtue of assigning an access modifier-public, private, or protected-to each class member.