COM+ Programming with Visual Basic

Defining Interfaces in Visual Basic

What keeps us from upgrading the CAccount class is that the client has a dependency on the first version of the public members of the class. There is no problem with changing private members, since they’re completely transparent to the client, but you cannot change public members. There is a one-to-one relationship between the class itself and the public members of the class. If the public members were not part of the CAccount class, then the client would not have dependencies on the class, and the class could be changed without problems. Therefore, we must dissociate the public member declarations from their implementation. To do this, a new entity known as an interface is built. The simplest definition of an interface is that it is a class with public properties and methods but without any code. The class serves as a definition of methods, a protocol that a client will use to communicate with the class. In Chapter 3, you are going to learn a more concrete definition. However, for now it is sufficient to think of an interface as a class with declarations but without code. For example, let’s return to the CAccount class. Instead of adding public members directly to this class, let’s create a second class and call it IAccount. The IAccount class will have the following code:

' Class IAccount

Public Property Get Balance(  ) As Currency
End Property

Public Sub MakeDeposit(ByVal Amount As Currency)
End Sub

As you can see from the definition, there are ...