Visual Basic Design Patterns: VB 6.0 and VB.NET

Chapter 14. The Prototype Pattern

The Prototype pattern is another tool you can use when you can specify the general class needed in a program but need to defer the exact class until execution time. It is similar to the Builder in that some class decides what components or details make up the final class. However, it differs in that the target classes are constructed by cloning one or more prototype classes and then changing or filling in the details of the cloned class to behave as desired.

Prototypes can be used whenever you need classes that differ only in the type of processing they offer—for example, in parsing of strings representing numbers in different radixes. In this sense, the prototype is nearly the same as the Examplar pattern described ...