Constants and Enumerations in Visual Basic

Constants are a way to use meaningful names in place of a value that does not change. Constants store values that, as the name implies, remain constant throughout the execution of an application. You can use constants to provide meaningful names, instead of numbers, making your code more readable.

Enumerations provide a convenient way to work with sets of related constants, and to associate constant values with names. For example, you can declare an enumeration for a set of integer constants associated with the days of the week, and then use the names of the days rather than their integer values in your code.

In This Section

• Constants in Visual Basic
  Topics in this section describe constants and their uses.

• Enumerations Overview
  Topics in this section describe enumerations and their uses.

• Intrinsic Constants and Enumerations
  Discusses the constants and enumerations that Visual Basic 2005 provides.

Related Sections

• Const Statement (Visual Basic)
  Provides syntax and usage rules for the Const statement, which is used to declare constants.

• Enum Statement (Visual Basic)
  Provides syntax and usage rules for the Enum statement, which is used to create enumerations.

• Option Explicit Statement (Visual Basic)
  Provides syntax and usage rules for the Option Explicit statement, which is used at module level to force explicit declaration of all variables in that module.

• Option Strict Statement
  Provides syntax and usage rules for the Option Strict statement, which restricts implicit data type conversions to widening conversions only.