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Originally published at Internet.comThis article is brought to you by WROX Press publisher of Professional VB .NET
When Visual Basic 4.0 was released, it introduced a whole new era of programming for VB. Object-oriented programming was finally a possibility. Unfortunately, few object-oriented features were included in the VB language at that point. Most notably lacking were true implementation inheritance capabilities, one of the key defining criteria for any OO language. VB was also missing a large number of secondary features such as method overloading and overriding, and constructors.
With VB.NET, the VB language finally completes the transition to a fully OO language. We now have full inheritance, along with all of the associated features we'd expect.
While it certainly remains possible to create applications that require the programmer to have no more knowledge of objects in VB.NET than in VB3, these new capabilities are quite pervasive and so at least some basic understanding is required to take full advantage of VB.NET.
VB.NET now supports the four major defining concepts required for a language to be fully object-oriented: * Abstraction * Encapsulation * Polymorphism * Inheritance
In the following article, we'll define and discuss each of these four major object oriented concepts...
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