Object Initialization Expressions and Anonymous Types in Visual Basic 9.0

Introduction

Visual Basic 9.0 introduces some new language features like Object Initializers and Anonymous Types. These features are really important to understand if you plan to learn LINQ, the major new feature in .NET Framework 3.5.

In this article, I will introduce Object Initializers and Anonymous Types in Visual Basic 2008, providing some code snippets to make the concepts clearer.

You are free to use Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition or greater, since the compiler is always the same.

Object Initialization Expressions

Object Initialization Expressions is about instantiating objects whose constructors receive no arguments even if objects themselves expose one or more property which can be initialized. To accomplish this, in Visual Basic 9.0, we can use the With keyword. Consider the following, very simple, Person class which exposes two properties, Name and Surname:

Class Person

    Private _name As String
    Private _surName As String

    Public Property Name() As String
        Get
            Return _name
        End Get
        Set(ByVal value As String)
            _name = value
        End Set
    End Property

    Public Property SurName() As String
        Get
            Return _surName
        End Get
        Set(ByVal value As String)
            _surName = value
        End Set
    End Property
End Class

As you can see, no explicit constructor has been specified. This means that the class implements a constructor that does not receive any arguments. To instantiate this class using Visual Basic 8.0, we have to write the following code:

Dim p As New Person

With p
     .Name = "Alessandro"
     .SurName = "Del Sole"
End With

Now, in Visual Basic 9.0, we can use the following syntax:

'Object Initialization Expression
Dim p As New Person With {.Name = "Alessandro", .SurName = "Del Sole"}

This is very useful both for writing less lines of code and for keeping the code clearer. Many WPF objects have constructors that receive no arguments, so this is another good chance to instantiate objects in the base class library.

Anonymous Types

Another new interesting feature of the .NET Framework 3.5 is in the so called Anonymous Types. Substantially, when you instantiate an object, you don’t need to specify its type but you can populate it with elements of your own interest. This must not be confused with the Local Type Inference, another .NET 3.5 feature, where the compiler automatically detects the type which an object belongs to. Anonymous types are really important in LINQ query expressions. Now, let’s see a pair of code snippets. Consider the following snippet:

'Anonymous type
Dim firstAnonymous = New With {.Name = "Alessandro", .Age = 30}

This instantiates a firstAnonymous object which is an anonymous type. As you can see, after the New keyword, no type is specified, but the object is initialized and populated with two members, which are respectively a String and an Integer (here, we have used again the Object Initialization Expression technique). These members are considered like normal properties, and every anonymous type must contain at least one. Moreover, anonymous types can contain read-only properties. To accomplish this, you must mark each property with the Key keyword, as you can see in the following code snippet:

'Anonymous type with two readonly properties
Dim secondAnonymous = New With {Key .Name = "Alessandro", Key .Age = 30}

It’s really important to consider that anonymous types are only visible from within the members that define them. This should not be a big problem since, as we said before, anonymous types’ main usage is within LINQ query expressions and not at the class or module level.

Points of Interest

Those we just saw are two really important language features in VB 9.0. You should take a deeper look if you plan to seriously use LINQ for data queries.