
6 Chapter 1 • New Features in Visual Basic .NET
.NET Framework
The best way to understand what .NET offers is to observe some of the limita-
tions of its predecessors. In this section, we take a very brief and simplified look
at the history of Microsoft component interaction and then a short look at the
architecture.
A Very Brief and Simplified History
When Windows 3.0 was introduced, the initial method used for communicating
across applications was Dynamic Data Exchange, or DDE. DDE was resource-
intensive, inflexible, and prone to cause system crashes. Nonetheless, it worked
acceptably on single machines, and for many years, many applications continued ...