Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

Understanding Reference Types

Reference types are represented by classes. Classes are probably the most important items in modern programming languages and are the basis of object-oriented programming. Reference types have one big difference from value types. Variables that declare a reference type do not store the data of the type itself; they just store an address to the data. In other words, they are just pointers to the data. To better explain (and understand) this fundamental concept, let’s look at an example. Consider the following class, Person, which exposes two simple properties:

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Class Person    Property FirstName As String    Property LastName As StringEnd Class

You need to create an instance of such a ...