Summary

Namespaces are everywhere in Visual Basic. Every piece of code you write is contained in some namespace, even if it is only the application’s root namespace. Despite their pervasiveness, many developers never need to use namespaces explicitly, so they find them somewhat mystical.

Namespaces are really quite simple, however. They merely divide programming items into a hierarchy. They enable you to categorize related items and resolve name collisions in different parts of the application.

You can use the Imports statement to allow the program to refer to items in a namespace without giving its fully qualified name. A namespace alias lets you explicitly specify an item’s namespace in an abbreviated form. This is particularly useful to resolve ambiguous names that appear in more than one namespace included in Imports statements.

This chapter describes namespaces in general. Chapter 18 describes some of the useful classes for grouping object classes, including those in the System.Collections and System.Collections.Generic namespaces.