Part 1

• Understanding C# Class and Member Modifiers
• How to: Control the Availability of a Variable
• Access Levels in Visual Basic
• Working with .NET access modifiers

Classes and their access modifiers

So let’s see what the differences are between the access modifiers of VB.Net and C#. I found this list.

For VB.Net that would be:

• Private
• Protected
• Friend
• Protected friend
• Public

In C# that will be:

• private
• protected
• internal
• protected internal
• public

So Friend becomes internal in C# and C# uses a different capitalization. That is a good thing to remember.

Now let’s see if they do the same thing.

Private or private

Let’s try something.

In C_Class_Library_2.

This gives me the error.

Elements defined in a namespace cannot be explicitly declared as private, protected, or protected internal

So I can’t do this. In C#, I had to build it before getting this error.

In VB_Class_Library_2.

Slightly different error.

Types declared ‘Private’ must be inside another type.

The VB.Net error seems to be more to the point. And I didn’t need to compile.

So lets use Private class for what it is intended.

In C_Class_Library_2.

In VB_Class_Library_2

These private classes can only be used inside the class where they are declared.

So doing this in the consoleapp will not work.

In C_Console.

The first line gives this error.

The type or namespace name ‘Class1_1′ does not exist in the namespace ‘C_Class_Library_2′ (are you missing an assembly reference?)

And the second line will give.

‘C_Class_Library_2.Class1.Class1_1′ is inaccessible due to its protection level

Now let’s do the same in VB.Net.

In VB_Console.

The first line gives this.

Type ‘VB_Class_Library_2.Class1_1′ is not defined.

The second line gives.

‘VB_Class_Library_2.Class1.Class1_1′ is not accessible in this context because it is ‘Private’.

Now lets see if we can return something of Class1_1.

In C_Class_Library_2

After compilation we get this error message.

Inconsistent accessibility: return type ‘C_Class_Library_2.Class1.Class1_1′ is less accessible than method ‘C_Class_Library_2.Class1.getClass1_1()’

Which is very logical.

In VB_Class_Library_2.

We get this error message.

‘GetClass1_1′ cannot expose type ‘Class1_1′ in namespace ‘VB_Class_Library_2′ through class ‘Class1′.

Seems fine by me.

Apart from a difference in wording, they seem to be both in agreement. I wish the two teams could sit together and get the error messages the same, preferably taking the good from both sides.

This post is long enough. I think I covered all the basics of private class. You might think this is too basic, but I learned something from it. I could have gone on and on with nesting, but I guess you get the point. Next up is protected or Protected.