VB.Net

Everything You Wanted to Know About Forms Inheritance in VB.Net

A major change occurred for VB programmers when Microsoft announced that the launch of their new VB.NET was to become the successor for the Visual Basic programming language.

What VB lacks is the power of INHERITANCE, so Microsoft decided to implement inheritance in VB.NET. Every time we need a new form in our applications we create a new instance of the System.Windows.Forms.Form class, change its properties to suit our needs, place some controls and our form is ready for use.  As we know, by placing some controls onto a new form, we extend the forms class to NewForm1, meaning we have created a new class with a name NewForm1. Our new form is a class; we can extend any class due to inheritance supported in .NET.

So from this we can conclude that we can design the base form and use the base form design in all our forms:

Base Form:
Public Class PMainForm
    Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Form

Child Forms:
Public Class Child1
    Inherits PMainForm

Now we can use the Child Forms in the ways we desired. Things we can do with our child forms: override the functionality of the base form within the child form itself (i.e. using Shadows keyword in our functions in the child form – we will also see this in detail later on in this article), we can add custom properties to our base form and set them in the child forms (for controlling the controls which originally do not exist in the parent form) and anything else we’d like.