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

25.8. Wrap-Up

This chapter introduced generics—one of Visual Basic’s newest capabilities. We discussed how generics ensure compile-time type safety by checking for type mismatches at compile time. You learned that the compiler will allow generic code to compile only if all the operations performed on the type parameters in the generic code are supported for all the types that could be used with the generic code. You also learned how to declare generic methods and classes using type parameters. We demonstrated how to use a type constraint to specify the requirements for a type parameter—a key component of compile-time type safety. We discussed several kinds of type constraints, including reference type constraints, value type constraints, class ...