Chapter 11. Inheritance and Polymorphism

In Chapter 8, you learned how to create new types by declaring classes, and in Chapter 3, you saw a discussion of the principle object relationships of association, aggregation, and specialization. This chapter focuses on specialization , which is implemented in VB.NET through inheritance . This chapter also explains how instances of more specialized classes can be treated as if they were instances of more general classes, a process known as polymorphism . This chapter ends with a consideration of not inheritable classes , which cannot be specialized, and a discussion of the root of all classes, the Object class.