Introduction

Welcome to Visual Basic 2008, the most mature version yet of the most popular programming language for building Windows and web applications. In modern software development, however, the language is only one of the components we use to build applications. The most important component is the .NET Framework, which is an indispensable component of every application; it's actually more important than the language itself. You can think of the Framework as an enormous collection of functions for just about any programming task. All drawing methods, for example, are part of the System.Drawing class. To draw a rectangle, you call the DrawRectangle method of the System.Drawing class, passing the appropriate arguments. To create a new folder, ...

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