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

25.1. Introduction

In Chapter 24, we presented data structures that store and manipulate Object references. You could store any Object in these data structures. One inconvenient aspect of storing Object references occurs when retrieving them from a collection. An application normally needs to process specific types of objects. As a result, the Object references obtained from a collection typically need to be downcast to an appropriate type to allow the application to process the objects correctly. In addition, data of value types (e.g., Integer and Double) must be boxed to be manipulated with Object references, which increases the overhead of processing such data. Also, processing all data as type Object limits the Visual Basic compiler’s ability ...