Anything for you, Ivan

Thanks guys, got the idea.

No, Ivan, you can have as many Imports as you want... they don't affect the runtime whatsoever.  They're more compiler directives than anything.

Not necessarily.  But keep in mind that you can create multiple sealed classes as well.  It is best to keep things that are related within a single class. 

Hiya.

Having a sealed class being a container for methods, I might need to write many "Imports" on the top of it for all the methods that will be in the class.

Would this be a bad practice?

You can have as many classes in a file as you want... you can even have nested classes.  Basically, with VB.NET, you can have a 1 file to 1 class relationship, or you can have a multiple file to 1 class relationship (partial classes... part of the class exists in each file), or you can have a 1 file to multiple class relationship.  The code file does not define a class... the Public Class <ClassName> and End Class do.  Open up one of the .designer.vb files for one of your business objects and drop down the left combo box at the top of the file... you'll see how many classes exist in that one file.  And besides the business object, they're all nested.

And here's where my VB6 brain  is having trouble... I dont understand how I can place the enum 'outside' of the Module.

I've seen examples like this:

I dont understand how you can have two classes in the same file. I am under the impression that you can only have one class per file.  What gives?

P.S. I really appreciate this thread and the advice on using a shared class instead of a module... that is invaluable information that I might not otherwise pickup.

Awesome! Thanks for the info.

Basically, a "sealed" class is what you use in VB to be a container for methods.  (C# has a "static" class, but "sealed" is as close as you can get in VB).  You create the class, and it becomes the module (actually, when you compile a module in VB.NET, it creates a class out of the module on the back end.. which you can see if you use reflection).

Public NotInheritable Class MyModuleClass

     '-- A private constructor keeps someone from accidentally trying to create an instance of this class
     Private Sub New() 
     End Sub

     '-- All of your methods and fields are then marked with "Shared"
     Public Shared Function MyFunc(ByVal value As String) As String
          '-- Parse the value
     End Function

End Class

'-- When you access these Shared methods and fields, you access them like this:
MyModuleClass.MyFunc("test") '-- you use the ClassName. syntax and you get all of the shared methods on the class

Ok, I moved the enums outside of the Module and now it looks like this:

And here's where my VB6 brain  is having trouble... I dont understand how I can place the enum 'outside' of the Module. When I created the module, it created a Module1.vb file... and inside it was

I assumed that everything had to reside inside there, and the only thing allowed outside was the Imports statements at the top.