Watch out for Shadows

While messing around with types for a personal project, I ran into some unusual problems involving the Shadows operator. For background, let me explain that I had two classes, one of which extended the other, each of which containing an identically named class that would hold additional data for it. I wanted one class to override the other in the derived class, thereby swapping out the data type of that extra storage field. Since classes can't be declared Overloads, I settled for Shadows, which seems to have the same effect. I applied it to both the class and the field.

But it doesn't! Members declared Shadows will only be called if the invocation is on an object that is strictly known to be of the derived type! I was actually declaring two fields with an identical name but different data types. When I used the polymorphic approach and simply read from the field, I was only accessing the field declared by the superclass, never the subclass.

Shadows is not the same as Overloads. Make sure you know you're creating two different members when using it. In my case, the issue was solved by changing the field to a property and giving the conflicting members (both class and field) different names. Then, I could just have the subclass report its own field of its own data type.