Lesson 20 - Structures, boxing, partial members and methods in detail

In the previous exercise, Solved tasks for OOP in VB .NET lesson 19, we've practiced our knowledge from previous lessons.

In the previous lesson, Solved tasks for OOP in VB .NET lesson 19, you learned all about events. Now, I would like to welcome you all to the last two lessons of our object-oriented programming in Visual Basic .NET course. Since you've gotten this far, you most likely already know how to program very well, congratulations These last two lessons contain several final constructs that we haven't gone over yet because most people don't use them too often. We won't go into them too far into detail, but knowing all that you do up until now, you could probably figure the rest out on your own. The main reason as to why I won't go too far into detail is that there are a lot of them and it is best if you understand what they are there for in case you ever need to use them. If you ever forget what any of them do, just come back and re-read the lesson.

Structures

Back when we discussed value and reference types, we learned that classes are stored on the heap using references. While primitive types, e.g. Integer, are stored directly in the stack. Imagine if we wanted to create a data type that would be very small, wouldn't be used very often and would have many instances of it declared (e.g. a matrix, complex number or vector). In that case, it wouldn't be wise to create it as a class. Instead, we would use structures for these intents and purposes.

We declare a structure much like

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