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Architecture
The overall architecture of your application
is critical. What do I mean by architecture? I'm talking
about the way you create classes and the forms that use
the data they expose. The more strictly you adhere to the
principles of OO the better chance you have of reaping the
rewards OO programming; ease of maintenance; speed; readability
etc. That said however you will also discover that you can
easily take this concept over the top. Now this might offend
the OO purists in our midst but be careful not to take the
approach of "I'm only going to write this piece of
code once in my entire application; I'll encapsulate it
into an object and just use it everywhere!" Sure this
works for some things - like having generic methods you
can inherit to handle validation and data access but at
a point your code will become unreadable - exercising some
constraint in your newfound OO fervor is advisable for your
sanity.
The Singelton class
One of the first architectural challenges
you will come across is the question of how to build your
application so that there is a central place to store and
retrieve application wide settings. There are two approaches;
one is to write a singelton class approach as discussed
in the MS article Exploring
the Singleton Design Pattern; the other is to declare
a sub routine in a Module as the startup object. This will
provide a central place to manage application wide objects
and settings.
Putting OO to work for the first
time
One of the simplest examples of putting
OO techniques to work is using simple inheritance. Many
times you will have a multitude of lookup table items, for
example Status, Priority, Types etc. with very similar properties
typically and ID and Name. Each time you create a class
you instead of explicitly creating the properties every
time; create a baseitem class which encapsulates the common
ID and Name properties (see below) then create the new class
that inherits the baseitem class.
Public Class
Status
Inherits BaseItem
End Class
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