Visual Basic 2015 Unleashed

Everything Is an Object

In.NET development, you might hear that everything is an object. This is because all the types in the .NET Framework, including built-in and custom types, inherit from the System.Object class. Inheritance is an important concept in object-oriented programming and is discussed in Chapter 12, “Inheritance.” For now, we can define inheritance as a way of reusing and extending data types so developers can create their hierarchy of types. System.Object provides the primary infrastructure that all .NET types must have. The .NET Framework ships with thousands of built-in data types that all derive from System.Object. But why is this class so important in the Common Type System? The answer is simple: The Common Type System ensures ...