Beginning Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 12. Advanced Object-Oriented Techniques

In Chapter 11, you looked at how you can build your own objects. Prior to that, you had been mostly using objects that already existed in the .NET Framework to build your applications. In this chapter, you'll take a look at some more object-oriented software development techniques.

In the first half of this chapter, you create your own classes. You will create a single-tier application like the others we have discussed so far in this book. The idea of creating two-tier applications, as opposed to single-tier applications, will be introduced in Chapter 14. You then learn about creating your own shared properties and methods. These are very useful when you want a method or property to apply to a class as a whole rather than a specific instance of that class. Finally, you look at memory management in Visual Studio 2008 and what you can do to clean up your objects properly.

In this chapter, you will:

• Create classes that can be used by multiple applications

• Learn about shared properties and methods

• Learn about memory management in the .NET Framework

Building a Favorites Viewer

In the first half of this chapter, you're going to build a simple application that displays all your Internet Explorer favorites and provides a button that you can click to open the URL in Internet Explorer. This application illustrates a key point regarding code reuse and some of the reasons why building code in an object-oriented fashion is so powerful.

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