Introduction

As promised , this is your introductory chapter. If you are reading this, you are ready to see how Visual Basic .NET (VB .NET) handles at top speed. It will be helpful for you to first understand some important fundamentals; some things are unique to .NET, so you may not have encountered them even if you have programmed in languages other than Visual Basic 6 (VB6).

Everything in .NET is subclassed from the Object class. However, there are types that behave like native types with the benefit of features found in classes. Chapter 1 illustrates the difference between value types and reference types, reviews the essential fundamentals of the new object-oriented idiom (the class), talks about nondeterministic object cleanup and garbage collection, and shows you how to look at the Intermediate Language (IL) code generated by the VB .NET compiler.

Understanding these features of VB .NET will help you quickly progress to more advanced concepts. Without further ado, let's continue.