Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .NET

Core CTS Types

Now that you have a good understanding of the fundamental concepts associated with the CTS, let's take a quick tour through the system-supplied CTS types you will use most frequently. We'll start with the primitive types, and then discuss programming with the Object, String, and Array class types.

Primitive Types

It's difficult to imagine writing software without access to a rich set of built-in primitive types. Fortunately, the CTS supplies a set of CLS-compliant (i.e., language-neutral) primitive types for general application programming. These primitive types are listed in Figure 3.5, along with the Visual Basic .NET language keywords that map to these types.

Figure 3.5. CLS-compliant primitive types of the CTS

Primitive types ...