Object Oriented Programming for VB.NET - Part 1

by Budi Kurniawan
09/25/2001

If you ask an OOP guru what an OOP language is, you will probably hear him/her utter words such as class, interface, information hiding, encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, etc. Those sound cool, don't they? OOP, however, is a topic that is not too easy to master in a day or two or by just attending a lecture. To truly understand it, you need to know the theory as well as do some OOP coding practice. This article offers readers just getting into OOP the very basics of OOP, using VB.NET as the language. It is not a complete reference, but it is something to start with.

The Benefits of OOP

Have you wondered why modern programming languages tend to be object-oriented? C++ was created as an extension of C to support OOP. And Java, one of the most popular languages on the planet, is also an OOP language. Then, of course, VisualBasic has evolved into VB.NET, a fully OOP language. There is a good reason for this transformation. OOP offers several benefits, such as easy code maintenance, extensibility, and code reuse, not found in procedural programming languages. Some of the benefits are outlined below.

• Easy Maintenance. Modularity is inherent in OOP. Entities are represented by classes and classes with the same functionality are located in the same namespace (package). You can add a class into a namespace without affecting other members of the namespace.
• Extensibility. OOP naturally supports extensibility. Having a class with certain functionality, you can quickly extend that class to create a different class with extended functionality.
• Code Reuse. Since functionality is encapsulated into a class and each class is an independent entity, providing a library is very easy. In fact, programmers of any .NET Framework language can and should use the .NET Framework class library, an extensive library that provides rich functionality. Better still, you can extend the functionality of the class library to provide classes that suit your needs.

OOP Features

Now, let's look at some of the features of OOP, starting with the easiest one, classes.

Classes

Classes are the main focus in OOP. Simply put, a class is a data type that provides some functionality. A class in VB.NET is declared using the keyword Class. For example, Listing 1 presents a class called Employee.

Listing 1: Class Employee

Class Employee
End Class

As simple as that. Note that Microsoft recommends the use of Pascal-case naming for classes. This means the first character of a class name is uppercase, and so is the first letter of any subsequent concatenated words. Good class names according to this convention include GeneralManager, SmallDictionary, StringUtil, and so on.

Class Members

Do you find OOP important to your Visual Basic programming needs? Give some examples.

Post your comments

A class can have members such as fields, properties and subroutines and functions. For example, Listing 2 presents the Employee class with a subroutine called Work.

Listing 2: Class Employee with method Work

Class Employee
  Public Sub Work ()
    ' Do something here
  End Sub
End Class

Subroutines and functions are both called methods. Method names are also Pascal-case. Another type of class member is a field. A field name is camel-case, which means you capitalize the first character of each word except the initial character. Examples of good field names are salary, quarterlyBonus, etc. Adding two fields called salary and yearlyBonus to the Employee class in Listing 2 will result in the following code.

Listing 3: Class Employee with two fields

Class Employee

  Dim salary As Decimal = 40000
  Dim yearlyBonus As Decimal = 4000

  Public Sub PrintSalary()
    ' print the salary to the Console
    System.Console.Write(salary)
  End Sub

End Class

Instantiating an Object

A class is a template or a blueprint of the entity that the class represents. To use a class's field or method or any other member, you need to first turn the class into an object, just as the blueprint of a sports car is useless until assembly workers make the car. In other words, you drive a car, not the blueprint of a car.

In OOP, an object is said to be an instance of a class. Creating an object is therefore known as instantiation. The code in Listing 4 demonstrates the instantiation of the Employee class.

Listing 4: Instantiating an object

Class Employee

  Dim salary As Decimal = 40000
  Dim yearlyBonus As Decimal = 4000

  Public Sub PrintSalary()
    ' print the salary to the Console
    System.Console.Write(salary)
  End Sub

End Class

Module Module1
  Public Sub Main()

    Dim anEmployee As Employee
    anEmployee = New Employee()
    anEmployee.PrintSalary()

  End Sub
End Module

The module Module1 in Listing 4 provides the Main sub, which is the entry point of a VB.NET program. In order to compile, a source file must provide access to the Main sub in one way or another. If you are not using Visual Studio.NET, you can compile your VB.NET program with vbc.exe, which is automatically installed when you install the .NET Framework. For instance, if you save your source code as Employee.vb, go to the directory where the file Employee.vb is stored, and then type vbc Employee.vb.

Now back to the code. The Main sub first declares an object variable of type Employee. The variable is called anEmployee.

Dim anEmployee As Employee

It then instantiates Employee with the keyword New.

anEmployee = New Employee()

Now that you have an object of type Employee, you can use its functionality. (Once the car is built, you can start and drive it.) In our example, we can call the PrintSalary method as follows.

anEmployee.PrintSalary()

This will print the value of the salary variable in Employee.

You can also move the Main sub into the class. This way, you don't need a module. This approach is shown in Listing 5.

Pages: 1, 2, 3

Next Page