Visual Studio® 2008 ALL-IN-ONE DESK REFERENCE FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter V.3. Get Some Class

In This Chapter

When Rick first learned how to program computers, the flow of programming was sequential. You wrote one line of code after another. Each line of code was numbered, and you thought about your program in terms of what happens first and what happens next.

When he went to college, he was taught a more sophisticated approach to programming that uses functions to group statements of code. Functions are great because you can easily organize your code into reusable blocks.

When he started working as a programmer, he encountered yet a third programming paradigm that organizes code into classes. He found this curious because even though a program's basic building block is classes, the style of programming is called object-oriented programming (OOP).

Visual Studio provides many tools that support the activities of object-oriented design (OOD) and programming. This chapter covers some of the basics of working with objects and classes, and shows you how to use Class Designer to visually design and inspect classes and objects.

Bringing Programs to Life the Object-Oriented Way

Most programmers take awhile to figure out the relationship between objects and classes when they first encounter OOP. If you think of software as a means of modeling a real-world scenario, the following points are worth remembering:

• Objects represent the people, places, and things in your program. For example, think about a business that sends an invoice to a customer. Invoice #100984 ...