Julia Lerman started it! And the Bill McCarthy jumped in, and it was all good! “It”, is a description about VB.NET’s Shared definition which equates more or less directly to C# and Java’s Static keyword. VB.NET already had used “Static” for quite another purpose historically.

Both posts do an excellent job of explaining the usage of Shared in VB.NET.  It’s not a new concept, but it throws lot’s of VB’ers because of the holdover baggage from Basic 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and VB1,2,3,4,5,6 days, not to mention, QuickBasic and all of it’s incarnations.

So if you are ever struggling to understand the differences, or explain them to someone else, either or both of these posts would be a great reference.

Bob Porter