Chapter 1 Understanding the .NET Framework

Team Fly

Page 1

Chapter 1
Understanding the .NET Framework

VISUAL BASIC .NET was not written by Visual Basic programmers. The entire .NET family of languages was created by C programmers. C—and its cohort OOP—is an academic language. Visual Basic is a popular language.

These facts have consequences. Visual Basic was conceived in 1990 specifically as an alternative to C. VB was designed as a rapid application-development language—blessedly free of cant and obscurantism. VB was created especially for the small businessman who wanted to quickly put together a little tax calculation utility, or the mother who wanted to write a little geography quiz to help Billy with his homework. VB was programming for the people. Several hundred thousand people use C; millions use Visual Basic.

As with many cultures—Rome versus Egypt, USA versus France, town versus gown—programming languages quickly divided into two camps. C and its offspring (C++, Java, C#, and others) represent one great camp of programmers. Visual Basic is the other camp. However, .NET is an attempt to merge Visual Basic with the C languages—while still retaining as much as possible of the famous populist VB punctuation (direct, clear, straightforward, English-like), syntax, and diction.

Many professors, bless them, thrive on abstraction, classification, and fine distinctions. That's one reason why VB.NET is in some ways more confusing than necessary. It has many layers of ''accessibility" (scoping) and many varieties of ways to organize data, some more useful than others. It has multiple "qualification" schemes; considerable redundancy; single terms with multiple meanings (strong typing, for example); multiple terms for a single behavior (Imports versus Import); and all kinds of exceptions to its own rules.

VB.NET, however, is clearly an improvement over earlier versions of VB in many respects. We must all find ways of moving from local to distributed programming techniques. And VB.NET is also quite a bit more powerful than previous versions. For example, streaming replaces traditional file I/O, but streaming can also handle data flowing from several sources—not just the hard drive. Streaming considerably expands your data management tools. You can replace a FileStream with a WebResponse object, and send your data to a Web client.

Nonetheless, in the effort to merge all computer languages under the .NET umbrella, VB had to give up some of its clarity and simplicity. In fact, VB now produces the same compiled code

Team Fly