Summary

In this chapter, we reviewed classes and types that standard .NET Framework components expose to us. All the .NET types inherit from System.Object. We should use the new method to construct .NET objects in our PerlNET programs. We use hash-reference syntax to access properties or fields and standard Perl calling-method syntax for invoking methods of the constructed objects. Classes may expose indexed properties (indexers). We may treat such classes as arrays. .NET strings cannot be used directly in PerlNET. We may use a variety of .NET arrays in our programs: one-dimensional, multidimensional (limited to three dimensions), and jagged arrays. Finally, we presented collections and demonstrated their use on the ArrayList class. Collections provide more flexibility in treating lists of data than do .NET arrays. In the next chapter, we learn how to create our own .NET components that we may reuse in PerlNET or other .NET-compliant languages as regular .NET objects.