Often times applications require lists of things: lists of customers, lists of experiments, lists of accounts and so on. The generic lists provided in .NET 2.0 made working with these lists easy. And the list initializers in C# and the object initializers in VB make lists easier still.
As an example, here is a first draft of a simple Customer class.
In C#:
public class Customer
{
public int CustomerId { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string EmailAddress { get; set; }
}
The above code takes advantage of automatically implemented properties. VB does not yet have this feature, but it is expected with VB 10.
In VB:
Public Class Customer
Private _CustomerId As Integer
Public Property CustomerId() As Integer
Get
Return _CustomerId
End Get
Set(ByVal value As Integer)
_CustomerId = value
End Set
End Property
Private _FirstName As String
Public Property FirstName() As String
Get
Return _FirstName
End Get
Set(ByVal value As String)
_FirstName = value
End Set
End Property
Private _LastName As String
Public Property LastName() As String
Get
Return _LastName
End Get
Set(ByVal value As String)
_LastName = value
End Set
End Property
Private _EmailAddress As String
Public Property EmailAddress () As String
Get
Return _EmailAddress
End Get
Set(ByVal value As String)
_EmailAddress = value
End Set
End Property
End Class
Most often, you would read the customers from a database and build the list. But there are times where you may want to build the list manually. For example, for prototyping or testing.
With C#, you can build a list of customers in one line of code:
List<Customer> custList = new List<Customer>
{new Customer()
{ CustomerId = 1,
FirstName="Bilbo",
LastName = "Baggins",
EmailAddress = "bb@hob.me"},
new Customer()
{ CustomerId = 2,
FirstName="Frodo",
LastName = "Baggins",
EmailAddress = "fb@hob.me"},
new Customer()
{ CustomerId = 3,
FirstName="Samwise",
LastName = "Gamgee",
EmailAddress = "sg@hob.me"},
new Customer()
{ CustomerId = 4,
FirstName="Rosie",
LastName = "Cotton",
EmailAddress = "rc@hob.me"}};
The above example takes advantage of the list initializers feature of C#. VB does not yet have this feature, but it is expected in VB10.
The code to do this in VB takes advantage of object initializers:
Dim custList As New List(Of Customer)
custList.Add(New Customer With {.CustomerId = 1 _
.LastName = "Baggins", _
.FirstName = "Bilbo", _
.EmailAddress="bb@hob.me})
custList.Add(New Customer With {.CustomerId = 2 _
.LastName = "Baggins", _
.FirstName = "Frodo", _
.EmailAddress = fb@hob.me})
custList.Add(New Customer With {.CustomerId = 3, _
.LastName = "Gamgee", _
.FirstName = "Samwise", _
.EmailAddress = sg@hob.me})
custList.Add(New Customer With {.CustomerId = 4, _
.LastName = "Cotton", _
.FirstName = "Rosie", _
.EmailAddress = rc@hob.me})
Notice the With statement in this VB code.
Enjoy!