The original Visual Basic .NET was released in 2002. C# , which was released alongside with viual basic.net received the lion's share of media attention, while VB.NET (also 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 disadvantages in some areas, including a runtime that was ten times as large to package as the VB6 runtime and an increased memory footprint.
Visual Basic .NET 2003Visual Basic .NET 2003 was released with version 1.1 of the .NET Framework. New features 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 background compiler) 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.
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 added many features 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 (overview, details), which provides:
- easy access to certain areas of the .NET Framework that otherwise require significant code to access dynamically-generated classes (notably My.Forms)
- Improvements to the VB-to-VB.NET converter
- 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#.
