Chapter 6: The Nuts and Bolts of .NET Programming

Some Things Just Never Change

At this point, you have dabbled with the prerequisites discussed in Part One of this book. You have installed your Visual Studio .NET (VS .NET) software. You have explored several of the basic features offered in the VS .NET IDE. To top it off, you have written an extremely simple .NET program. Yet you want more.

That is where this chapter begins. Get prepared to cover several programming elements. You will examine the programming syntax that you would expect any language or platform to support. To keep it interesting for you, this chapter presents code examples in both the COBOL .NET ^[1] and Visual Basic .NET (VB .NET) syntax (being bilingual is your chosen direction, after all). However, there is no need to stop there.

You will then take a look under the hood at the Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL or IL) code. Those days of peeking at assembler language will seem just like yesterday as you are reminded of the relationship assembler has with COBOL (and that MSIL has with any .NET language).

^[1] In this chapter and throughout this book, I use "COBOL .NET" as a casual, unofficial reference to Fujitsu's NetCOBOL for .NET product.