Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

Imports Directives

As you saw earlier in this chapter, namespaces can expose objects that expose members. Moreover, namespaces can expose nested namespaces, which expose objects, and so on. You often need to access members of objects exposed by nested namespaces. To avoid needing to type the entire names of long (or nested) namespaces and write long lines of code, the Visual Basic language offers the Imports directive. For example, consider the following lines of code that open a file on disk:

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Dim myFile As New System.IO.FileStream("C:\test.bin",                                       IO.FileMode.Open)myFile.Close()

The FileStream class is exposed by the IO namespace, which is exposed by the System namespace. You ...