Visual Basic 2005 for Programmers: Deitel Developer Series, Second Edition

9.8. Using the Me Reference to Access the Current Object

Every object of a class shares the class’s method declarations. We have seen that an object’s methods can manipulate the object’s data. But how do methods know which object’s instance variables to manipulate? Every object has access to itself through a reference called Me (a Visual Basic keyword). On every method call, the compiler passes an object’s Me reference as an implicit argument to each of the object’s non-Shared methods. The Me reference can then be used to access a particular object’s members implicitly or explicitly. (Section 9.10 introduces Shared class members and explains why the Me reference is not implicitly passed to Shared methods.)

Class Time (Fig. 9.8) defines Private ...