Visual Basic® .NET by Example

Object Persistence

In the examples from the book we have shown a multitude of classes from different aspects of business and programming. Examples included accounts, orders, addresses, and persons, to name just a few. Most examples involved creating new objects and manipulating their data. In all the cases shown, you have assumed that the data for these objects (that is, the objects' state) is either entered by the user or created by you at runtime.

This is normally not the case. Most software systems store large parts of the data they operate upon in such a way that it is accessible also after the program has finished execution. For example, the account balance for all your bank or investment accounts is stored safely in some database of your ...