Visual Basic Design Patterns: VB 6.0 and VB.NET

Part 2. Creational Patterns

With the foregoing description of objects, inheritance, and interfaces in hand, we are now ready to begin discussing design patterns in earnest. Recall that these are merely recipes for writing better object-oriented programs. We have divided them into the Gang of Four's three groups: creational, structural, and behavioral. We'll start out in this section with the creational patterns.

All of the creational patterns deal with ways to create instances of objects. This is important because your program should not depend on how objects are created and arranged. In VB6, of course, the simplest way to create an instance of an object is by using the new operator.

set fred1 = new Fred              'instance of Fred class

However, this really ...