Intrinsic Constants and Enumerations

Visual Basic provides a number of intrinsic constants and enumerations to facilitate your programming.

Remarks

Constants store values that remain constant throughout the execution of an application. They are meaningful names that take the place of a number or string and make code more readable. Enumerations offer an easy way to work with sets of related constants. An enumeration, or Enum, is a symbolic name for a set of values.

You can create your own constants and enumerations, as discussed in User-Defined Constants, or you can use the intrinsic constants and enumerations Visual Basic provides, which are listed in the Object Browser.

The following table lists and describes the intrinsic enumerations available in Visual Basic.

Enumeration	Description
AppWinStyle Enumeration	Indicates the window style to use for the invoked program when calling the Shell function.
AudioPlayMode Enumeration	Indicates how to play sounds when calling audio methods.
BuiltInRole Enumeration	Indicates the type of role to check when calling the My.User.IsInRole Method.
CallType Enumeration	Indicates the type of procedure being invoked when calling the CallByName function.
CompareMethod Enumeration	Indicates how to compare strings when calling comparison functions.
DateFormat Enumeration	Indicates how to display dates when calling the FormatDateTime function.
DateInterval Enumeration	Indicates how to determine and format date intervals when calling date-related functions.
DeleteDirectoryOption Enumeration	Specifies what should be done when a directory that is to be deleted contains files or directories.
DueDate Enumeration	Indicates when payments are due when calling financial methods.
FieldType Enumeration	Indicates whether text fields are delimited or fixed-width.
FileAttribute Enumeration	Indicates the file attributes to use when calling file-access functions.
FirstDayOfWeek Enumeration	Indicates the first day of the week to use when calling date-related functions.
FirstWeekOfYear Enumeration	Indicates the first week of the year to use when calling date-related functions.
MsgBoxResult Enumeration	Indicates which button was pressed on a message box, returned by the MsgBox function.
MsgBoxStyle Enumeration	Indicates which buttons to display when calling the MsgBox function.
OpenAccess Enumeration	Identifies whether a file can be read from, written to, or both.
OpenMode Enumeration	Indicates what access mode should be used when accessing a file.
OpenShare Enumeration	Specifies whether other processes can access an open file.
RecycleOption Enumeration	Specifies whether a file should be deleted permanently or placed in the Recycle Bin.
SearchOption Enumeration	Specifies whether to search all or only top-level directories.
TriState Enumeration	Indicates a Boolean value or if the default should be used when calling number-formatting functions.
UICancelOption Enumeration	Specifies what should be done if the user clicks Cancel during an operation.
UIOption Enumeration	Specifies whether or not to show a progress dialog box when copying, deleting, or moving files or directories.
VariantType Enumeration	Indicates the type of a variant object, returned by the VarType function.
VbStrConv Enumeration	Indicates which type of conversion to perform when calling the StrConv function.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Declare A Constant

Concepts

Constants Overview

Constant and Literal Data Types

Enumerations Overview

User-Defined Constants

Reference

Enum Statement (Visual Basic)

Object Browser

Other Resources

Constants and Enumerations (Visual Basic)