In order to support Language Integrated Query (LINQ), a suite of new technologies was added to the upcoming release of Visual Basic® 2008 that includes type inference. In earlier versions of Visual Basic, a member's type was assumed to be Object unless a different type was explicitly declared in code, as shown in Figure 1. A drawback to declaring a variable this way is that the compiler is only able to assume that the value of the variable will be of type Object.
