Beginning Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 11. Building Objects

You may have heard the term object oriented a lot since you first started using computers. You may also have heard that it is a scary and tricky subject to understand. In its early years it was, but today's modern tools and languages make object orientation (OO) a wonderfully easy-to-understand concept that brings massive benefits to software developers. This is mainly because languages such as Visual Basic, C++, and, of course, Visual Basic 2008 and C# have matured to a point where they make creating objects and the programs that use them very easy indeed. With these development tools, you will have no problem understanding even the most advanced object-oriented concepts and will be able to use them to build exciting object-based applications.

You have been using objects and classes throughout this book, but in this chapter you look at object orientation in detail and build on the foundations of the previous chapters to start producing some cool applications using Visual Basic 2008.

In this chapter, you will:

• Build a reusable object with methods and properties

• Inherit the object that you build in another object

• Override methods and properties in your base object

• Create your own namespace

Understanding Objects

An object is almost anything you can think of. We work with physical objects all the time: televisions, cars, customers, reports, light bulbs — anything. In computer terms, an object is a representation of a thing that we want to manipulate in our application. ...