Does ‘Me’ in VB.NET refer only to an instantiation of the type? Just occurred to me that since I can reference properties in my VB.NET class without using ‘Me’, that I don’t see a reason for using it for this purpose. Will referencing the variable either way always refer to the actual stored value for the property at runtime?
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From the Me documentation on MSDN:
The Me keyword behaves like either an object variable or a structure variable referring to the current instance.
The use case described is that of passing the current object to another one.
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There are two main pursoses for the Me keyword.
You can use it to unambiguously refer to a member of this class. This allows local variables to use the same name, though this is poor practice.
Public Class MeExample
Public Sub New(Name As String)
Me.Name = Name
End Sub
Public Property Name As String
And you can use it within the class to use this instance of the object as a parameter in a method call.
Protected Overridable Sub OnNameChanged(e As EventArgs)
NameChanged(Me, e)
End Sub
Public Event NameChanged As EventHandler
End Class
And to complete the example, here’s the full implementation of the Name property so that it raises the NameChanged event.
Public Property Name As String
Get
Return _Name
End Get
Set(value As String)
If _Name <> value Then
_Name = value
OnNameChanged(EventArgs.Empty)
End If
End Set
End Property
Private _Name As String
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