The Property Bag

If you've ever made a user control, you will probably know that a property bag is, because that's where it's used the most.

Basicly a property bag is a virtuel container that can store almost any type of value. All infomation in the property bag is stored in Visual Basic's Variant-format. This allows for the user, that would be you, to add data to the property bag, and not worry about what kind of data it is. Be warned though, because the Variant-format can store any kind of data, you must carefully handle how you read the value that you've stored. You don't want to accidently try and sqeeze a picture-file into a Integer-variable.

The Variant-format is also the slowest variable-type due to its non-restrictive nature, but in most cases we only need to extract or store the values a few times during the programs execution so that won't be a problem.