The third type of member in classes is methods. This lesson assumes that you are already familiar with methods, so the syntax should look familiar.

In the past you learned that methods are a useful way to organize chunks of code to perform a task. But most methods belong to a class (even the ones you have written!), so methods are also used to define how an instance of a class behaves. You can think of them as the “actions” that an object can perform.

This code defines a method IncreaseArea() that changes the value of the Area property:

class Forest {
  public int Area
  { /* property body omitted */  }
  public int IncreaseArea(int growth)
  {
    Area = Area + growth;
    return Area;
  }
}

You would call the method like so:

Forest f = new Forest();
int result = f.IncreaseArea(2);
Console.WriteLine(result); // Prints 2