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Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) is an object-oriented computer language that can be viewed as an evolution of Microsoft's Visual Basic (VB) implemented on the Microsoft .NET framework. Its introduction has been controversial, as significant changes were made that broke backward compatibility with VB and caused a rift within the developer community that may or may not be resolved with the introduction of Visual Studio 2005.

The vast majority of VB.NET developers use Visual Studio .NET, although SharpDevelop provides an open-source alternative. The creation of open-source tools for VB.NET development have been slow compared to C#, although the Mono development platform provides an implementation of VB.NET-specific libraries and is working on a compiler, as well as the Windows Forms GUI library.

Similar to the virtual machine requirement of other programming languages, applications written in VB.NET require the .NET framework to execute.

Versions of Visual Basic .NET

As of November 2005 there have been three versions of Visual Basic .NET.

Visual Basic .NET

The original Visual Basic .NET was released alongside Visual C# and ASP.NET in 2002. C# — widely touted as Microsoft's answer to Java — received the lion's share of media attention, while VB.NET (sometimes known as VB7) was not widely covered. As a result, few outside the Visual Basic community paid much attention to it.

Those that did try the first version found a powerful but very different language under the hood, with significant disadvantages in some areas, including a runtime that was ten times as large to package as the VB6 runtime and a greatly increased memory footprint.

Visual Basic .NET 2003

Visual Basic .NET 2003 was released with version 1.1 of the .NET Framework. included support for the .NET Compact Framework and a better VB upgrade wizard. Improvements were also made to the performance and reliability of the .NET IDE (particularly the ) and runtime.

In addition, Visual Basic .NET 2003 was also available in the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Academic Edition (VS03AE). VS03AE is distributed to a certain number of scholars from each country for free.

Visual Basic 2005

Visual Basic 2005 is the next iteration of Visual Basic .NET, Microsoft having decided to drop the .NET portion of the title.

For this release, Microsoft in an attempt to reintroduce some of the ease of use that Visual Basic is famous for — or infamous, with respect to "newbie" programmers — including:

Edit and Continue - probably the biggest "missing feature" from Visual Basic, allowing the modification of code and immediate resumption of execution
Design-time expression evaluation
The My pseudo-namespace (, ), which provides:
*easy access to certain areas of the .NET Framework that otherwise require significant code to access
*dynamically-generated classes (notably My.Forms)

The Using keyword, simplifying the use of objects that require the Dispose pattern to free resources
Just My Code, which hides boilerplate code written by the Visual Studio .NET IDE
Data Source binding, easing database client/server development

The above functions (particularly My) are intended to reinforce Visual Basic .NET's focus as a rapid application development platform and further differentiate it from C#.

Visual Basic 2005 will also introduce features meant to fill in the gaps between itself and other "more powerful" .NET languages, adding:

such as:
*generics
*Partial classes, a method of defining some parts of a class in one file and then adding more definitions later; particularly useful for integrating user code with auto-generated code
XML comments that can be processed by tools like NDoc to produce "automatic" documentation
operator overloading
Support for unsigned integer data types commonly used in other languages

On the other hand, C# 2005 will have additional features that will not natively be in Visual Basic 2005:

Refactoring, the ability to automatically re-organize code. Visual Basic 2005 will require a separate VS add-on extension to take advantage of a limited number of code refactorings.
Anonymous methods, similar to closures.
Iterators, simpler IEnumerable implementations.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Visual Basic .NET ]

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