ADO.NET Cookbook

Class, Structure, and Interface Members

Classes, structures, and interfaces can contain one or more fields, methods, properties, and events. This section discusses converting the C# syntax for each of these constructs to Visual Basic.

Note that .NET supports both static (or shared) members (which apply to the type as a whole, and typically don’t require that an object of that type be instantiated) and instance members (which apply only to an instance of that type). Shared or static members are indicated by using the static keyword in C#. For example:

public static string ToString(long value);

The corresponding VB keyword is Shared, so the ToString method, when converted to VB, has the following syntax:

Public Shared Function ToString(value As Long) As String

Fields

A field is simply a constant or a variable that is exposed as a publicly accessible member of a type. In C#, for example, the Value field of the System.DBNull class has the syntax:

public static readonly DBNull Value;

Note that C# indicates the data type of a field before the name of the field. (For C# data types and their VB equivalents, see Table A-3.) Also note that fields are frequently read-only. Constant fields, in fact, are always read-only. As a result, the use of the C# readonly keyword and the VB ReadOnly keyword with fields is quite common.

The syntax for the Value field in Visual Basic then becomes:

Public Shared ReadOnly Value As DBNull

Methods

In C#, all methods have a return value, which appears before the name of ...