Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Shared Methods

Shared methods can be invoked without the need of creating an instance of the class that defines them. As in the previous members, shared methods are decorated with the Shared keyword. A common use of shared methods is within class libraries that act as helper repositories of functions. For example, you can have a class that provides methods for compressing and decompressing files using the System.IO.Compression namespace. In such scenario, you do not need to create an instance of the class; in fact, shared methods just need to point to some files and not to instance data. The following code snippet provides an example of shared methods:

As you can see, you invoke shared methods by writing the name of the class instead of creating ...