I'm going through a VB.NET book at the moment and I've come to a part about Interfaces. The book defines an Interface as follows:

Publice Interface IDriveable
    Sub GoForward(ByVal Speed As Integer)
    Sub Halt()
    Function DistanceTraveled() as Integer()
End Interface

It then goes on to show a normal use with:

Implements IDriveable

However it then shows under the title of "Polymorphism with Interfaces" the following:

Public Sub GoSomewhere(ByVal As IDriveable)
' implementation omitted
End Sub

Anthis is where I get stuck how whould you implement an Interface when its pasted as a parameter. I tried defining it as:

Dim x as IDriveable
x.FuelLevel = 10

And that produced a runtime error of 'SystemNullReferenceException'. I then tried to define it as:

Dim x = new IDriveable

That gave a design time error of not being able to use new with an Interface.

Any ideas?

But that gives a runtime error

You can not create an instance of an Interface because it's an abstract concept.

The GoSomewhere method is not expecting an instance of an interface, but rather it is saying "Please pass me an instance of a class that implements IDrivable".

So if we have these classes:

Class Car
   Implements IDriveable
End Class

Class Boat
   Implements IDriveable
End Class

and this method:

Public Sub GoSomewhere(ByVal As IDriveable)
' implementation omitted
End Sub

We can do this:

Dim myTruck As New Car
Dim myShip As New Boat

GoSomewhere(myTruck)
GoSomewhere(myShip)

This works because Car and Boat each implement the interface that the method expects. Think of it like this: The abstract 'instance' of the interface is piggy-backed on top of the real instance of the class. This way you can do something that is related to the interface without caring what the class type is of the actual object instance.

A very practical example of this that you might not even be aware that you use all the time is IEnumerable. Whenever you use a ForEach, .NET is asking the object that you iterate thru for it's GetEnumerator method that is provided by the IEnumerable interface. ForEach doesn't care if it is working with an array or a collection as long as the type it's dealing with implement IEnumerable.

-Peter

Thanks for that excellent reply.