Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .NET

Replacing Methods in a Derived Class

Now that you have seen the high-level motivation for polymorphism, it's time for a low-level explanation of the mechanics of how members are accessed at runtime. To use inheritance to add polymorphic behavior to your designs, you must first understand the differences between static binding and dynamic binding.

Static binding and dynamic binding represent two different ways in which a client can invoke a method or property of an object. Static binding is usually more straightforward and results in better performance. Dynamic binding yields greater flexibility and is the underlying mechanism that allows a derived class to replace behavior inherited from a base class. The latter type of binding is one of the ...