Migrating to .NET: A Pragmatic Path to Visual Basic .NET, Visual C++ .NET, and ASP.NET By Dhananjay Katre, Prashant Halari, Narayana Rao Surapaneni, Manu Gupta, Meghana Deshpande
Table of Contents
Chapter 2. New Features in Visual Basic .NET
Microsoft has made Visual Basic .NET a complete object-oriented language. It provides for structured exception handling. Objects that do not have any references to them are collected through the garbage collection mechanism of the .NET Framework, and hence Visual Basic .NET programmers do not have to worry about memory allocation and deallocation. Visual Basic .NET also offers multithreading capabilities.
Visual Basic .NET also can interoperate with other languages in the .NET Framework. This is possible because of the CTS and CLS. The other new features introduced are the Windows and the Web Forms packages. This makes Web application development very simple for the Visual Basic developers who are accustomed to the drag and drop features of the Visual Studio development environment.
Another advantage offered by the Microsoft .NET Framework for the Visual Basic .NET language is that now application deployment can be very simple because it involves only copying the application files into the clients ' directory. Registering COM components is no longer required when .NET components are developed in the Visual Basic .NET language. Microsoft has made the Visual Basic .NET language as powerful as Managed C++ or C# in the .NET Framework.
