Appendix B. Making the Transition from COM to the CLR

The move from the Common Object Model (COM) to the Common Language Runtime (CLR) as the underlying technology of the Visual Basic language was a significant one, requiring many changes to the language, large and small. This appendix discusses some of the major issues related to this transition that we encountered when designing Visual Basic .NET. A full and complete discussion of all the issues and changes between Visual Basic 6.0 and Visual Basic .NET is well beyond the scope of this appendix ”it could easily fill a book in its own right. However, the issues discussed are intended to give an idea of the kinds of problems and solutions that we dealt with as we moved from Visual Basic 6.0 to Visual Basic .NET 2002.