Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Coding Custom Extension Methods

One of the most interesting things when talking about extension methods is that you can create your custom extensions. This provides great power and flexibility to development because you can extend existing types with new functionalities, even if you do not have the source code for the type you want to extend. There are a set of rules and best practices to follow in coding custom extension methods; the first considerations are the following:

• In Visual Basic, extension methods can be defined only within modules, because they are considered as shared methods by the compiler.

• Only Function and Sub methods can be coded as extensions. Properties and other members cannot work as extensions.

• Methods must be decorated ...