Necessary Equipment

To read this book and understand the examples, you will need no special equipment. To use Visual Basic .NET and to run the examples found on the book’s web page, you need any computer that can reasonably run Visual Basic .NET. That means a reasonably modern, fast computer with a lot of memory. See the Visual Basic .NET documentation for Microsoft’s exact requirements and recommendations.

To build Visual Basic .NET programs, you will also need a copy of Visual Basic .NET. Don’t bother trying to run the examples shown here if you have a pre-.NET version of Visual Basic such as Visual Basic 6. The changes between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET are huge, and many Visual Basic .NET concepts don’t translate well into Visual Basic 6. With some experience in C#, it would be much easier to translate programs into that language.

Much of the Visual Basic 2005 release is compatible with Visual Basic .NET 2003 and earlier versions of Visual Basic .NET, however, so you can make many of the examples work with earlier versions of Visual Basic .NET. You will not be able to load the example programs downloaded from the book’s web site, however. You will need to copy and paste the significant portions of the code into your version of Visual Basic .NET.

The new features provided by the .NET Framework 3.0 require that version of the Framework. Notably these include WPF, WF, and WCF. You cannot use the new WPF controls, XAML, the Windows Workflow Foundation, or Windows Communication Foundation without installing the .NET Framework 3.0.

To work with WPF, you also need to install the latest Windows Software Development Kit (SDK). Go to the Microsoft Download Center (www.microsoft.com/downloads) and search for the Windows SDK. Currently, the most recent version is the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows Vista. This version can be as large as roughly 1 GB, so you may have trouble downloading it unless you have a fast Internet connection.

To use UAC security, you must have UAC security installed on your computer. UAC in installed and activated by default in the Windows Vista operating system.