.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell

Class, Structure, and Interface Members

Classes, structures, and interfaces can contain one or more fields, methods, properties, and events. This section will discuss converting the C# syntax for each of these constructs to VB.

Note that .NET supports both static (or shared) members (which apply to the type as a whole, and typically do not require that an object of that type be instantiated) and instance members (which apply only to an instance of that type). Shared or static members are indicated by using the static keyword in C#. For example:

public static bool IsMnemonic(char charCode, string text);

The corresponding VB keyword is Shared. Hence, the FromResource method, when converted to VB, has the following syntax:

Public Shared Function IsMnemonic(charCode As Char, text As String) _

   As Boolean

Fields

A field is simply a constant or a variable that is exposed as a publicly accessible member of a type. In C#, for example, the Nowhere field of the DataGrid.HitTestInfo class has the syntax:

public static readonly DataGrid.HitTestInfo Nowhere;

Note that C# indicates the data type of a field before the name of the field. (For C# data types and their VB equivalents, see Table 12-3.) Also note that fields are most often read-only. Constant fields, in fact, are always read-only. As a result, the use of the C# readonly keyword and the VB ReadOnly keyword with fields is quite common.

The syntax for the Nowhere field in Visual Basic then becomes:

Public Shared ReadOnly Nowhere As DataGrid.HitTestInfo ...