Chapter 1, Lesson 3

Hi all, today I stumbled through the third lesson of the training kit and this one was about Constructing Classes.

Phew, I thought, this will be a walk in the park. After all, I have been constructing classes for years. Was I wrong...

First topic: Inheritance. Ok, nothing fancy new here, but always good to brush up that know-how.

Secondly: Interfaces. Still doable. Interfaces are cool to work with. Especially when you can define your own, like I recently did for a project at work. No wonder this topic contained little news for me.

Up next: Partial Classes. Nice to know that you can now split code over multiple source files. It surely cleaned up that Windows Form code behind file ;-)

And then, oh yess: Generics. One of the biggies for the exam, at least according to the kit. This lesson is contributed for the biggest part to Generics, so there must be some thruth in that statement.

Although Generics are still quite abstract in my mind, Generics are all about boosting performance and reducing runtime errors. Can't be bad.
Instead of turning to the Object base type for flexibility, you can now let the consuming code of your class determine the Type.

Personal memo for the exam: Nullable is a Generic Type !

The 4th topic was about Events and using Delegates as EventHandlers, while the 5th and 6th topic talked about Attributes and Type Forwarding.

This last thing was quite new to me. It allows you to move a custom type from one source library to another without requiring client application consuming the first one (the one with the type) to be recompiled. Sort of like a 'I have moved to a new address' note for types. Cool stuff ;-)

To conclude: While doing the labs, I noticed that when you develop on Vista using VS 2008, you get all the benefits of the Aero directly in the Windows Forms. This includes the transparent look and the cool progressbar animations.

Next lesson will teach me everything there is to know about Converting Between Types. Feels like I'm back at collage :D

Stay in touch for more MCTS fun...