Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

The Base Class Library

The .NET Framework Base Class Library (BCL) provides thousands of reusable types that you can use in your code and that cover all the .NET technologies, such as WPF, ASP.NET 4.6, LINQ, and so on. Types defined in the BCL enable you to do millions of things without requiring you to call unmanaged code and Windows APIs and, often, without using external components. A type is something that states what an object must represent. For example, String and Integer are types, and you might have a variable of type String (that is, a text message) or a variable of type Integer (a number). Note that a type is not the same as a class. In fact, types can be of two kinds—reference types and value types—and a class is a reference type. ...