Thank you, gentlemen - this wasn't exactly what I was looking for, as the value I was trying to pass to the base class's constructor was *different* from the value being passed to the derived class's constructor. However, after seeing your solution, and looking up the documentation on this use of the base keyword, I realized that this represented a design flaw.

I find it interesting how often the rules of .NET languages (and maybe particularly in C#) coerce the developer toward a better implementation. The freedom of an interpreted, weakly-typed language like VFP is indeed a boon to rapid application development. But this comes at a price. It's easy to shoot yourself in the foot and not recognize a poor design until later. It's still possible to do this in .NET, but I think that it forces one to employ a more robust design initially, which has to be a good thing.

Also, with the constructor syntax of VB.NET (which I generally prefer, with all constructors named New()), I could have done what I was trying to do, as I think I could have done a MyBase(A_DifferentArgument).