Visual Basic® .NET Unleashed

Chapter 7. Creating Classes

In This Chapter

• Defining Classes

• Encapsulation and Information Hiding

• Adding Field and Property Members

• Adding Methods to Classes

• Adding Class Events

• Defining Nested Classes

• Creating Instances of a Class

• Summary

The ability to define a class and create instances of classes is one of the most important capabilities of any object-oriented language. Until recently Visual Basic didn't really support object-oriented classes. Though VB6 modules were called class modules, they were really interfaces in the Common Object Model (COM) sense of the word. This means that VB6 didn't support the class idiom and didn't support inheritance, another powerful benefit of object-oriented languages.

The key difference between interfaces and classes ...