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About VB.NET
About Microsoft VB.NET
So have you taken an interest in programming in Microsoft's VB.NET and need help getting started?
First of all, let's get an understanding of .NET. .NET is a standard of languages which include VB.NET, C#.NET, C++.NET and many more. The .NET Framework is required to install software created in the language. The Framework is designed to allow software written in any .NET language to do exactly the same as the next. It is what is known as a collection of libraries.
Basically, when a program is compiled under .NET, the software is not directly compiled to access the system, it is in fact compiled to access the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework itself will then perform the operations that would be requested by the compiled software. This system makes programming far less iterative but means that the compiled software is slower. It also means that any .NET language can perform exactly the same commands, just in a different langauge. The different languages are known as the syntax whilst the commands that are peformed are known as the semantics.
VB.NET stands for Visual Basic .NET. It is technically a derivation of the BASIC language. It is the simplest of the .NET languages to learn as it is written very closely to English. Here is a sample:
Dim username As String = "jamie balfour"
What this line of code is doing is declaring a variable (or value) which has the name "username" and the value "jamie balfour". The speech marks indicate that this data is a pure string. A string is a collection of characters - the most basic type of variable which contains text.
However, it is what you do with the variable that matters. We can perform many operations on this string, one of which is concatenation (the joining of strings). .NET makes this easy:
Dim finalString As String
Dim username As String = "jamie balfour"
Dim oldUserName As String = "jamie b"
finalString = username & " " & oldUserName
When we concatenate the strings, we join them, so the result of this operation would be that
finalString would read "jamie balfour jamie b".
So, this part of the article was just designed to show some samples of how easy it is to develop using Microsoft's Visual Basic .NET. For more information, read on through the other articles.
My experience with
VB.NET
About my experience with VB.NET
So what have I developed using VB.NET?
Well whilst I was at high school I became very interested in programming. In 2006, I decided that programming was for me, and changed my primary interest from computer hardware to computer programming.
My first application was designed as what I refer to as a Desktop-Replacement Program (DRP). The idea was that people running Windows 2000 and XP could get a new style and theme to their operating system whilst being able to run many new programs that were developed by myself.
So in this software, you had access to many different applications including a word processor, graphics package, internet browser and much more. However, support and programming for this application ended in 2008 when the software became messy. I learned a valuable lesson from this software when it became too hard to program. Ever since then, I started to perform concise programming, where I would comment most lines and would make Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL) of code to prevent the re-writting of commonly used code. All of this has lead to my programs being smaller and compact, whilst being more feature-rich. For instance, my word processor that I have developed uses the graphics features of my graphics package due to the fact that it is all stored in a single DLL.
The majority of my programming skills have got better since 2006, mainly and
the most important ones where I reuse code using dedicated methods.
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