You're Shadowing My Stupidity Overload

When I wrote my Overloads vs Shadows post, I was obviously still in the grips of my confusion. One of those times when you think you're being clever, but in fact you're not quite clever enough.

Having looked into what the compiler does (and admittedly not much more at the spec), and calmed down a bit, I offer this attempt at clarification.

• Within the same "declaration context" (Class, Interface or Module), you can use the same name more than once, as long as at most one of the uses is a typey thing (class, enum, event/delegate), and all the others (which are methods or properties) have different signatures. No keywords are necessary nor can they influence the compiler's behaviour.
  
• When considering inherited members with the same name as your own members:
  • If you're overriding a method/property, that's fine. We all know what that's about.
  • Otherwise, by default, the member in your class Shadows all inherited members of the same name. None of the inherited members are accessible except by casting your object reference to the base type.
  • However, if you add the Overloads keyword to the member in your derived class, the member only makes inaccessible any base members that have the same signature.

So the confusion stems (for me at least) from being brought up to believe that Overloads means "there are other methods/properties in this class with the same name". Curse you, section 4.1.1!

I promise never to use Overloads this way again.