Deborah's Developer MindScape

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 9 (VS 2008):

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.

In C#:  

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.

In VB 9 (VS 2008):

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!

EDIT 4/29/10: This syntax is much easier now in VB 10 (VS 2010). See this link for more information on auto-implemented properties in VB 10. See this link for more information on collection initializers in VB 10.