1.3. What Can You Do with Visual Basic .NET?With its language enhancements and its tight integration into the .NET Framework, Visual Basic is a thoroughly modernized language that has become one of the premier development tools for creating a wide range of .NET applications. In the past, Visual Basic was often seen as a "lightweight" language that could be used for particular kinds of tasks but was wholly unsuited for others. (It was often argued, sometimes incorrectly, that you couldn't create such things as Windows dynamic link libraries or shell extensions using Visual Basic.) In the .NET Framework, Visual Basic emerges as an equal player; Microsoft's claim of language independencethat programming language should be a lifestyle choice, rather than something forced on the developer by the character of a projectis realized in the .NET platform. This means that Visual Basic can be used to create a wide range of applications and components, including the following:
Most importantly, with the release of .NET, Visual Basic becomes an all-purpose development environment for building Internet applications, an area in which it has traditionally been weak. Each successive release of Visual Basic should further enhance its position as the tool of choice for developing state-of-the-art software, both now and long into the future. |