Professional Visual Basic 2012 and .NET 4.5 Programming

Visual Studio 2012

For those who aren't familiar with the main elements of .NET development there is the common language runtime (CLR), the .NET Framework, the various language compilers and Visual Studio. Each of these plays a role; for example, the CLR—covered in Chapter 2—manages the execution of code on the .NET platform. Thus code can be targeted to run on a specific version of this runtime environment.

The .NET Framework provides a series of classes that developers leverage across implementation languages. This framework or Class Library is versioned and targeted to run on a specific minimum version of the CLR. It is this library along with the language compilers that are referenced by Visual Studio. Visual Studio allows you to build applications that target one or more of the versions of what is generically called .NET.

In some cases the CLR and the .NET Framework will be the same; for example, .NET Framework version 1.0 ran on CLR version 1.0. In other cases just as Visual Basic's compiler is on version 10, the .NET Framework might have a newer version targeting an older version of the CLR.

The same concepts carry into Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2003 was focused on .NET 1.1, while the earlier Visual Studio .NET (2002) was focused on .NET 1.0. Originally, each version of Visual Studio was optimized for a particular version of .NET. Similarly, Visual Studio 2005 was optimized for .NET 2.0, but then along came the exception of the .NET Framework version 3.0. This introduced ...