Appendix E. What s New and Different in Visual Basic .NET 2003

Appendix E. What's New and Different in Visual Basic .NET 2003

If Visual Basic .NET 2002 represented a monumental leap in the path of the Visual Basic language, the 2003 release of Visual Basic .NET was, in many ways, the extra step you take to balance yourself after making the first big leap. VB.NET 2003 was a minor upgrade to the language, as acknowledged by its internal version number, 7.1. Its release paralleled the upgrade to the .NET Framework, also short-stepping to just Version 1.1.

This is not to say that there were no benefits to the programmer in this release. There were clearly improvements in terms of both performance and usability, especially through changes made to the Visual Studio environment. However, changes to the Visual Basic language itself were limited.