Visual Basic Programming: Inheritance and Polymorphism

In this module, we look at how we can persist data to files so that it will exist beyond a single execution of a program. We will look at how we can write data to files in both text and binary formats. We follow-up with ways to read that data back into the state of an executing program.

In this module, we look at how to implement the is-a relationships we modeled earlier in our UML diagrams through the use of Inheritance. Inheritance provides additional ways to abstract code in taxonomies where base classes share code with specialized versions of the classes. We will add a discussion about exceptions work in Visual Basic now that we can discuss inheritance.

In this module, we extend our implementation of the is-a relationships so that our code can work with specializations of a class without knowing the specifics of the specialization. This level of abstraction is known as polymorphism. Polymorphism provides additional ways to abstract code to work on objects in a taxonomy.