Programming Visual Basic 2008

Chapter 8. Classes and Inheritance

How many .NET programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None—they call a method on the light bulb object, and it changes itself. Ha, ha, ha! That’s funny, but only if you understand the object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts that are the basic foundation of the .NET system. (Actually, it’s not even that funny if you do understand OOP.) Without OOP, it would be difficult to support core features of .NET, such as the central System.Object object, which is the basic foundation of the .NET system. Also, productivity would go way down among Windows developers, who are the basic foundation of the .NET system.

Although I briefly mentioned OOP development concepts in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, it was only to provide some context for other topics of discussion. But in this chapter, I hold back no longer. After a vigorous discussion of general OOP concepts, I’ll discuss how you can use these concepts in your .NET code.

Object-Oriented Programming Concepts

If you’ve read this far into the book, it’s probably OK to let you in on the secret of object-oriented computing. The secret is: it’s all a sham, a hoax, a coverup. That’s right, your computer does not really perform any processing with objects, no matter what their orientation. The CPU in your computer processes data and logic statements the old-fashioned way: one step at a time, moving through specific areas in memory as directed by the logic, manipulating individual values and bits according to ...