Mastering Microsoft Visual Basic 2008

Welcome to Visual Basic 2008, the most mature version yet of the most popular programming language for building Windows and web applications. In modern software development, however, the language is only one of the components we use to build applications. The most important component is the .NET Framework, which is an indispensable component of every application; it’s actually more important than the language itself. You can think of the Framework as an enormous collection of functions for just about any programming task. All drawing methods, for example, are part of the System.Drawing class. To draw a rectangle, you call the DrawRectangle method of the System.Drawing class, passing the appropriate arguments. To create a new folder, you call the CreateDirectory method of the Directory class, and to retrieve the files in a folder you call the GetFiles method of the same class.

The Framework contains all the functionality of the operating system and makes it available to your application throughmethods. The language and the Framework are the two ‘‘programming’’ components, absolutely necessary to build Windows applications. It’s possible to develop applications with these two components alone, but the process would be awfully slow. The software development process relies on numerous tools that streamline the coding experience, and these tools are provided for us by Visual Studio 2008.

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