Chapter 11. Structures and Enumerations

So far, many important concepts about .NET development with Visual Basic have been discussed. Just to mention some key topics, the book has covered class fundamentals, object lifetimes, type organization, and exception handling. All these concepts have been applied to reference types (classes). But in your developer life, you will often work with value types, both built-in and custom ones. In Chapter 4, “Data Types and Expressions,” you started with the most important built-in value types in the .NET Framework. To complete your skills, though, you now need to know how to implement your own value types. In this chapter you get this information. You first understand structures and how to create them. Then you learn how to extend structures with custom versions of operators. Finally, you learn about enumerations, another kind of value type in the .NET Framework. This is not just a simple illustration because you also gain information on memory allocation to get a complete overview of this development area.