VB .NET Language in a Nutshell

Chapter 8. The Language Reference

This long chapter documents VB .NET language elements. To help you speed the process of finding the right element to perform a particular task, you can use Appendix B to determine what language elements are available for the purpose you require. If you’re using Visual Studio .NET, you can also make use of its Object Browser to browse the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace.

In documenting the VB .NET language, we’ve tried to provide a consistent and uniform treatment of particular types of language elements. These language elements are:

Functions

The entry for each function provides the standard information that you’d expect for a function: its syntax, parameters (if it has any), return value, and description. In addition, we list rules for using the function (see Section ), discuss tips and tricks related to the function (see Section ), frequently provide examples, and list related language elements.

In addition, each VB .NET function is in fact a method, since it is a member of a particular class in the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace. In each case, we’ve listed the class to which the function belongs.

For the first time, Visual Basic supports both named and positional arguments for all functions, procedures, and methods, with just a few exceptions. Functions, procedures, or methods that accept parameter arrays as arguments don’t accept named arguments if the ParamArray parameter is present. And “functions” that are actually resolved by the compiler ...