Faster Smarter Beginning Programming

Key Points

• The .NET Framework provides more than 16,000 classes you can use in Visual Basic .NET programs. The number of properties and methods these classes offer is even larger. You can search for useful classes several different ways in the MSDN Library.

• Microsoft organizes .NET classes into hierarchical categories called namespaces.

• If your program contains an Imports statement for a given namespace, you don’t need to specify fully qualified names for classes in that namespace.

• Inheritance refers to the ability of one class to inherit the properties of another class. If one class does almost everything you want, you can write a new class that inherits it and then code only the additional features or exceptions. A derived class inherits from ...