An Introduction to Visual Basic .NET 2008

Visual Basic .NET is an object orientated programming language which is a combination of Microsoft’s Visual Basic in conjunction with the .NET framework. VB .NET was designed by Microsoft to increase the development speed of GUI applications for the Windows platform.

Visual Basic was originally designed to be easy

to use and learn, while making the development of simple graphical programs easy, visual basic also offers many powerful features for the development of large and complex applications.

The .NET framework is a large library of code created to reduce the amount of common programming problems. The framework uses an application virtual machine created by the (CLR). The CLR (Common Language Runtime) allows developers to produce code without worrying about capabilities of the CPU, this is all handled by the CLR. The CLR manages code that was written directly for the .NET framework.

One of Visual Basic's biggest downfalls and the very reason it was avoided by some developers was its limitations to only run under Windows.

Visual Basic can now be run on other platforms such as Linux, this is made possible by Mono.
Mono is an open-source development platform which has created a Visual Basic compiler, written in Visual Basic which will allow compiling and running off VB scripts on any operating system that supports mono.

Some downsides to using the .NET framework are that older versions of windows do not have .NET installed and developers feel that the size of the package is sometimes big enough to put the end user off installing the framework.