Introduction

Overview

When Visual Basic first appeared, it revolutionized Windows programming. By handling many of the tedious details of processing Windows events, it enabled programmers to focus on application details instead of Windows programming trivia.

Unfortunately, early versions of Visual Basic had a few drawbacks. Protection from the underlying Windows details came at the price of reduced flexibility. Using Visual Basic meant that you didn’t need to mess with the sticky details of Windows event loops, but it also made working directly with those events more difficult when you really wanted to. Advanced programmers could still pry off the cover and work at this lower level, but this was somewhat dangerous. If your code didn’t handle all the details correctly, it could crash the program and possibly Windows itself.

Visual Basic also followed a path different from that taken by other Windows programming languages such as C++. It provided a more productive development environment and a generally more intuitive syntax. Its syntax for object-oriented development was more restrictive, however. A developer could still build safe, reliable, extensible applications, but it took some experience and care.

Visual Studio .NET addressed many of these shortcomings. It merged the Visual Basic and C++ development environments into an even more powerful tool. It added the C# language (pronounced “C-sharp”) and gave all three a common underlying runtime language called Common Language Runtime (CLR). Visual Basic .NET incorporated changes to bring the language more into line with CLR and the other languages. It included more structured error handling, new syntax for declaring and initializing variables, overloaded functions and subroutines, and a more powerful model for creating classes that include true inheritance.

Visual Basic 2005 adds new features that make Visual Basic a more powerful language than ever. It includes new language features such as unsigned data types, operator overloading, and short-circuit logical operators; object-oriented enhancements such as more flexible property procedure accessibility, generics, and custom events; and coding improvements such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) comments, better IntelliSense, and code snippets.

Visual Basic 2005 is the second major release of this programming language. Most of the obvious bugs in the first release (surprisingly few for such a major reshaping of the language) have been ironed out, so there has never been a better time to learn the language. The first release has proven stable and the current release brings new capabilities to Visual Basic programmers. Developers waiting to see what would become of Visual Basic .NET have their answer: It is here to stay.