Inheritance and the Base Object Class
Almost everything you do with Visual Basic involves objects, including some entities not normally thought of as objects, such as strings and integers. All objects in Visual Basic are derived from, and inherit methods from, a base class called System.Object. The System.Object class provides a common base class for all objects in the .NET Framework, ensuring interoperability of objects developed using Visual Studio. New classes implicitly inherit the System.Object class; it is never necessary to explicitly name this class with an Inherits statement.
Among the methods that objects inherit from System.Object, one of the most useful is GetType, which is used to return the exact type of the current object.
See Also
Concepts
Overriding Properties and Methods