Visual Basic Design Patterns: VB 6.0 and VB.NET

Part 3. Structural Patterns

Structural patterns describe how classes and objects can be combined to form larger structures. The difference between class patterns and object patterns is that class patterns describe how inheritance can be used to provide more useful program interfaces. Object patterns, on the other hand, describe how objects can be composed into larger structures using object composition or the inclusion of objects within other objects.

For example, we'll see that the Adapter pattern can be used to make one class interface match another to make programming easier. We'll also look at a number of other structural patterns where we combine objects to provide new functionality. The Composite, for instance, is exactly that—a composition ...