Type Names

One last note about object expressions before we move on: Have you noticed that MSDN talks about the Int32 (and sometimes I do, too), but Visual Basic calls it an Integer? As we’ll see when we examine the .NET Base Class Library, both of these are types defined by the .NET Framework itself, and like all types in the .NET Framework Library, they have PascalCase names.

But Visual Basic also defines keywords for the most common types and, like all keywords, they have no capitalization at all. The Visual Basic keywords are the same as those used in most older versions of VB, so presumably the designers thought it would be more comfortable for people who were used to them.

Visual Studio gives preference to the Visual Basic keywords, particularly in Intellisense but I prefer the .NET Framework type names. (I program in several different languages, so it’s easier for me to only remember a single set of names.) But the keywords are just synonyms. At compile time, they’re translated into references to the .NET Framework types. It doesn’t matter which one you use and you can even use a combination of both without problem.