Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++® 2010

Chapter 7. Defining Your Own Data Types

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• How structures are used

• How classes are used

• The basic components of a class and how you define class types

• How to create, and use, objects of a class

• How to control access to members of a class

• How to create constructors

• The default constructor

• References in the context of classes

• How to implement the copy constructor

• How C++/CLI classes differ from native C++ classes

• How to define and use properties in a C++/CLI class

• How to define and use literal fields

• How to define and use initonly fields

• What a static constructor is

This chapter is about creating your own data types to suit your particular problem. It's also about creating objects, the building blocks of object-oriented programming. An object can seem a bit mysterious to the uninitiated, but as you will see in this chapter, an object can be just an instance of one of your own data types.

THE STRUCT IN C++

A structure is a user-defined type that you define using the keyword struct, so it is often referred to as a struct. The struct originated back in the C language, and C++ incorporates and expands on the C struct. A struct in C++ is functionally replaceable by a class insofar as anything you can do with a struct, you can also achieve by using a class; however, because Windows was written in C before C++ became widely used, the struct appears pervasively in Windows programming. It is also widely used today, so you really need to know something about structs. We'll ...