Book Image

Visual Basic Quickstart Guide

By : Aspen Olmsted
Book Image

Visual Basic Quickstart Guide

By: Aspen Olmsted

Overview of this book

Whether you’re an absolute beginner or an experienced developer looking to learn the Visual Basic language, this book takes a hands-on approach to guide you through the process. From the very first chapters, you'll delve into writing programs, exploring core concepts such as data types, decision branching, and iteration. Additionally, you’ll get to grips with working with data structures, file I/O, and essential object-oriented principles like inheritance and polymorphism. This book goes beyond the basics to equip you with the skills to read and write code across the entire VB family, spanning VB Script, VBA, VB Classic, and VB.NET, enabling you to handle legacy code maintenance with ease. With clear explanations, practical examples, and hands-on exercises, this book empowers you to tackle real-world software development tasks, whether you're enhancing existing projects or embarking on new ones. It addresses common challenges like distinguishing between the variations of the VB programming language to help you choose the right one for your projects. Don't let VB's extensive legacy daunt you; embrace it with this comprehensive guide that equips you with practical, up-to-date coding skills to overcome the challenges presented by Visual Basic's rich history of over two decades.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Visual Basic Programming and Scripting
9
Part 2:Visual Basic Files and Data Structures
14
Part 3:Object-Oriented Visual Basic
20
Part 4:Server-Side Development

Sealed classes

In VB, there is no direct equivalent keyword to sealed, which exists in some other programming languages, such as C#. In C#, the sealed keyword is used to prevent a class from being inherited (that is, it cannot serve as a base class). The sealed concept is important if the programmer has code that should never be specialized. An example could be an authorization class that validates a user and you do not want changes to the authorization method. However, in VB, all classes are inheritable by default, meaning that any class can be used as a base class unless it is specifically designed as an abstract class (using the MustInherit keyword, as explained in the previous section). To prevent a class from being inherited in VB, you can use the NotInheritable keyword when defining the class. The NotInheritable keyword is the equivalent of the sealed keyword in C#.

Here’s an example of a NotInheritable class in VB:

NotInheritable Public Class Singleton
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