Appendix F. What s New and Different in Visual Basic 2005

Appendix F. What's New and Different in Visual Basic 2005

The 2005 release of Visual Basic includes major enhancements over the previous 2003 edition. Its internal version number is 8.0, and it matches a related major update of the .NET Framework, now at Version 2.0. Microsoft also removed the ".NET" term from the name of each product in the Visual Studio family. Visual Basic .NET is now known officially as Visual Basic.

This release includes many usability enhancements, many of which are realized only when using the Visual Studio 2005 product. For instance, Visual Basic now includes Edit and Continue, a feature available in all pre-.NET versions of Visual Basic, which allows source code to be modified in an actively running program. The changes are immediately reflected in the running code. A parallel change, design-time expression evaluation, processes individual source-code statements without the need to fully build an application (although Visual Studio actually builds a mini-application in the background to evaluate the expression).

The Visual Studio environment also includes enhanced error reporting, including recommendations on changing errant VB code. Code snippets, auto-completion features, and enhanced project and item templates also support faster code development.

While these and other Visual Studio-level enhancements make Visual Basic a more productive language, this appendix focuses on the language enhancements included in the 2005 release.

Visual Basic 2005 includes several new keywords that may have been used as variable or member names in your pre-2005 Visual Basic code. This release includes a command-line utility, vb7to8.exe, which checks existing Visual Basic code for keyword conflicts.