Visual Basic 2005 in a Nutshell, Third Edition

Referencing Components and Classes | 89

Program

Structure

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Copyright © 2006 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Console applications are often procedural in nature; they start at the begin-

ning of the application and run until the end, uninterrupted by external user

events like mouse clicks. In this era of Windows applications, console appli-

cations exist to provide some basic textual information to the user or to

control some service or process that does not logically have a need for a user

interface.

Windows Services

Windows services are long-running applications that interact directly with

the system but not with the user. In fact, they run only within the context of

the Windows Service architecture; you cannot start them directly like an EXE

file. Even when they run, they belong to the system (in terms of their security

profile), not the local user.

Class Libraries

Class libraries are more commonly called dynamic link libraries, or DLLs.

Although not true standalone applications, most applications would be

limited without the plethora of available DLLs; the functionality in the .NET

Framework Class Library is made available through DLL files. DLLs are

loaded at runtime by the applications that use them, and they run in the

program space of the controlling application. A special variation of a class

library, the Web Control Library, is used ...