Programming Visual Basic .NET

Chapter 1. Introduction

With its release for the .NET platform, the Visual Basic language has undergone dramatic changes. For example:

• The language itself is now fully object-oriented.

• Applications and components written in Visual Basic .NET have full access to the .NET Framework, an extensive class library that provides system and application services.

• All applications developed using Visual Basic .NET run within a managed runtime environment, the .NET common language runtime.

In this introduction, I briefly discuss these changes and other changes before showing you three very simple, but complete, Visual Basic .NET applications.

What Is the Microsoft .NET Framework?

The .NET Framework encompasses the following:

• A new way to expose operating system and other APIs. For years, the set of Windows functionality that was available to developers and the way that functionality was invoked were dependent on the language environment being used. For example, the Windows operating system provides the ability to create windows (obviously). Yet, the way this feature was invoked from a C++ program was dramatically different from the way it was invoked from a Visual Basic program. With .NET, the way that operating system services are invoked is uniform across all languages (including code embedded in ASP.NET pages).

  This portion of .NET is commonly referred to as the .NET Framework class library.

• A new infrastructure for managing application execution. To provide a number of sophisticated new ...