101 Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET Applications

Application #1. Use Arrays

This sample shows you how to create, search, and sort arrays. Arrays are commonly used for grouping similar items, such as employee names in a list. Arrays provide a convenient container in which to store items, and they make it easy to manipulate those items using a single set of code.

New Concepts

To create an array, you declare a variable with a number in parentheses after it—for example, Dim Employees(4) As String. This example creates an array that will hold not four but five String elements because .NET arrays are always zero-based. This means that the first element has an index of zero and the fifth element has an index of 4. You use the index to refer to a particular element, such as Employees.GetValue(2) ...