Introducing the Framework Class Library
As you have probably figured out from its name, the class library is merely a collection of classes and related structures that can be leveraged as base building blocks for application development. As such, it is safe to think of this collection of classes as an API: They are a boundary interface between our applications and the operating system. This concept, of course, is really nothing new to Visual Basic developers: the ADO library, the Win32 API, the COM+ services library—all of these constructs have allowed us to reference and use pre-existing code in our applications. The class library is a massive library of pre-existing code that you can use as a foundation for your application features.
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