Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Rules About Properties

The Common Language Specification provides a couple of rules about properties implementation:

• All properties exposed by a class must have the same access level, meaning that they must be all instance properties or all shared properties or all virtual properties. Virtual properties (that is, marked with the MustOverride keyword) are described in Chapter 12.

• Get, Set, and the property itself must return and receive the same type; the type must also be CLS-compliant. If the property returns String, both Get and Set must handle String, too. The type must be passed by value and not by reference.