Explicit Interface Implementation

Let’s imagine that you have a class with two methods:

public class VendingMachine
{
    public bool InsertCoin(float amount)
    {
        if (amount < 500)
        {
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    }

    public string Buy()
    {
        return "Buy";
    }
}

Now when we want to create an instance of this class and call one of those methods, it executes as expected:

VendingMachine machine = new VendingMachine();
machine.InsertCoin(5); // false
machine.Buy();         // "Buy"

Now suppose that we have an interface called IVendingMachine that has two methods:

public interface IVendingMachine
{
    bool InsertCoin(float amount);
    string Buy();
}

We want our class to implements this interface:

public class VendingMachine : IVendingMachine
{
    public bool InsertCoin(float amount)
    {
        if (amount < 500)
        {
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    }

    public string Buy()
    {
        return "Buy";
    }
}

Our class satisfied the interface because it has the methods with the same names. So Visual Studio doesn’t give you a compiler error. Now let’s imagine that we also want to add interface’s methods to this class, So, in this case, we must explicitly prefix the methods with IVendingMachine.:

public class VendingMachine : IVendingMachine
{
    public bool InsertCoin(float amount)
    {
        if (amount < 500)
        {
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    }

    bool IVendingMachine.InsertCoin(float amount)
    {
        if (amount < 300)
        {
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }

    public string Buy()
    {
        return "Buy";
    }

    string IVendingMachine.Buy()
    {
        return "IVendingMachine Buy";
    }
}

Note that Visual Studio can help you to implement interface explicitly by pressing Ctrl + . on the name of the interface and select Implement interface explicitly:

• Concrete Type
• Interface Variable

If we want the methods of VendingMachine we should create the object with concrete type:

VendingMachine machine = new VendingMachine();
machine.InsertCoin(5); // false
machine.Buy();         // "Buy"

If we want the methods of IVendingMachine we should create the object with interface variable:

IVendingMachine machine = new VendingMachine();
machine.InsertCoin(5); // true
machine.Buy();         // "IVendingMachine Buy"