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.
The great majority of VB.NET developers use Visual Studio .NET as their integrated development environment (IDE). Web devlopment provides an open-source alternative IDE.
Visual Basic .NET is a programming environment used to create graphical user interface (GUI) applications for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. It usually ships in two types, either by itself or as part of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. To use the lessons on this site, you must have installed either Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 or Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. All instructions on this site will be based on an installation of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. From now on, unless specified otherwise, we will use the expressions "Microsoft Visual Basic" or "Visual Basic" to refer to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003. If we want to refer to another version, we will state it.
