Most of the features presented here are provided by the CLR and are available for all languages targeted for the CLR, such as Microsoft C#, Visual C++ with managed extensions, Visual Basic .NET, COBOL.NET, Perl, and Python. Visual Basic .NET offers the following language features: -
Fully object-oriented language -
Structured exception handling -
Multithreading capabilities -
Language interoperability Apart from the language-specific features, Visual Basic .NET also offers the following features provided by the .NET Framework: -
Two new forms packages (Windows Forms and Web Forms) -
Easy deployment of applications -
Side-by-side execution of different versions of the same components -
Improved memory management through a garbage collection mechanism -
Interoperability with existing COM components and applications -
Ease of Web and Windows services development With these new features Visual Basic developers get the ease of development of the applications that they are accustomed to. It also gives the full power of the .NET Framework features to Visual Basic developers. Now all languages in .NET Framework are more or less equally powerful in the .NET Framework and even Visual Basic .NET has the same powerful capabilities as Managed VC++ and C#. With the help of Web Forms and ADO.NET, a developer can now rapidly develop scalable Web sites. Because implementation inheritance and overloading and overriding capabilities have been introduced in Visual Basic .NET, it is now a truly object-oriented programming language. Windows Forms natively supports accessibility and visual inheritance. The language-specific features of VB.NET are covered in the following subsections. |