Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .NET

Summary

As you read through this chapter, one theme probably became clear: The use of inheritance increases your responsibilities both during the design phase and during the coding phase. If you decide to create a class from which other classes will inherit, you must make several extra design decisions. If you make these decisions incorrectly, you can get yourself into hot water pretty quickly. This is especially true when you need to revise a base class after other programmers have already begun to use it.

The first question you should address is whether it makes sense to use inheritance in your designs. In other words, should you be designing and writing your own base classes to be inherited by other classes? Once you've made a decision to ...