A Disruptive Release

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	ADO.NET Programming in Visual Basic .NET By Steve  Holzner, Bob  Howell
	Table of Contents
	Introduction

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When I first started working with the beta versions of Visual Studio .NET, I could see from the very beginning that this was going to be a disruptive release, a term I adapted from sociology. In sociology, disruptive innovation refers to the invention of something so revolutionary that it changes the basic rules by which the society functions. The automobile, airplane, and personal computer are all examples of disruptive innovation.

Once the automobile was invented there was no reason to further develop horse-drawn buggies. So by calling VB .NET a disruptive release I mean that Visual Studio .NET is such a radical departure from what most VB Classic programmers are used to that it would require almost complete retraining to bring them to the point of being as productive as they were in their prior VB version. Having programmed in VB since Version 1.0, I remembered what the conversion from VB 3 to VB 4 entailed. That was the last time Microsoft radically changed the language to support 32-bit programming and operating systems such as Windows 95 and NT.

Microsoft also switched from the VB-specific VBX format component model to the new (at the time) OCX OLE-based component model. This caused a lot of consternation and discussion (read whining and complaining) among the programming community. If that seemed difficult, this time is not even remotely as easy. That was a breeze compared to this.

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