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Microsoft Visual Basic .NET is a language that was designed from the start to specifically address the needs of the next -generation applications for the Microsoft Windows platform. As a result, it has introduced many language and platform enhancements that are of special interest to enterprise developers. These changes have made for a significant departure from prior releases of Visual Basic, but they are intended to simplify the development process as well as significantly increase your development productivity. This chapter will not address every feature of the Visual Basic .NET language. I will instead focus on the features and language elements that are important to enterprise application development. As any experienced developer knows , the improper use of features within any language or platform can have subtle implications that can cause logical errors or performance problems. It is therefore important to ensure that you use any feature in the most optimal way, especially when performance or resource consumption are critical. Throughout this chapter, I'll point out such issues, when they exist, to give you the information you need to make the right choices. More Info For our purposes, it is important that you have a basic familiarity with Visual Basic .NET. For an introduction to Visual Basic .NET, you can investigate one of the Visual Basic .NET references available from Microsoft Press. Although Visual Basic .NET is a common language runtime (CLR) language, many of its features rely on the .NET Framework and all of the utility classes and functionality it provides. (See the upcoming sidebar.) Sometimes Visual Basic .NET language features are so closely tied to the .NET Framework that it's virtually impossible to distinguish the two. Together, Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Framework make possible many things that were impossible or impractical using previous incarnations of Visual Basic. These new features allow Visual Basic .NET to fit into the enterprise application development process in a fundamentally different and more meaningful way. For example, the CLR makes it possible to implement core object-oriented programming (OOP) features and flexible componentization that enables integrated team development and true code reuse across projects, applications, and organizations. The .NET Framework libraries, on the other hand, provide a rich set of features that offer many simpler solutions to common development tasks .
This chapter will start by looking at special features that take us beyond Visual Basic 6.0. We'll then investigate types in Visual Basic .NET, OOP language features, error handling, and resource management. Other books cover similar material, but here we're interested in how these features facilitate development of larger and more sophisticated applications. |
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