What Is Inheritance?

For years, one of the most requested features from Visual Basic developers has been inheritance. Microsoft has had one form of inheritance, interface inheritance, available in VB since VB first started supporting object creation in VB4. Developers, however, wanted to have what is known as implementation inheritance. With VB .NET, developers finally get their wish, thanks to the CLR. If you're unclear on what interface and implementation inheritance are, read on.

Inheritance is a very powerful form of code reuse. With inheritance, you write one class that contains some properties and methods. That class becomes the basis for other classes, and is known as the base class. Classes that then use this base class are known as ...

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