Professional Visual Basic 2012 and .NET 4.5 Programming

Abstraction

Abstraction is the process by which you can think about specific properties or behaviors without thinking about a particular object that has those properties or behaviors. Abstraction is merely the ability of a language to create “black box” code, to take a concept and create an abstract representation of that concept within a program.

A Customer object, for example, is an abstract representation of a real-world customer. A DataSet object is an abstract representation of a set of data.

Abstraction enables you to recognize how things are similar and to ignore differences, to think in general terms and not in specifics. A TextBox control is an abstraction because you can place it on a form and then tailor it to your needs by setting properties. Visual Basic enables you to define abstractions using classes.

Any language that enables a developer to create a class from which objects can be instantiated meets this criterion, and Visual Basic is no exception. You can easily create a class to represent a customer, essentially providing an abstraction. You can then create instances of that class, whereby each object can have its own attributes, representing a specific customer.

In Visual Basic, you implement abstraction by creating a class using the Class keyword. To see this in action, right-click on your solution and select Add New Project. From the Add New Project dialogue select a Visual Basic Windows Forms Application project and name it “VB2012_ObjectDataSource.” Once ...