VB.NET 2005 Free Training: Differences between VB.NET 1.0 and VB.NET 2.0: VB.NET 2005 comes with a number of enhancements. The IntelliSense Code snippets, the Windows Forms designer updates, IntelliSense filtering, debugger data tips, exception Assistant etc make the software a pleasure to work with. The language has been spruced up with generics, unsigned types, Operator overloading etc.
The My Namespace is the most significant enhancement that provides a single reference to commonly used functionalities within the .NET framework. It includes classes like Application, Computer, Forms, Resources, Settings and Users. This enables users to ping a computer with a simple line of code or play a audio file with a one line code.
Example:
My Computer Audio Play(“….*(name of file).wav)
A number of mundane problems being faced by coders have been solved in the process. The IntelliSense has taken away much of the pain of development by correcting errors and making suggestions even during the process of development. This improves the quality of codes and reduces the time taken to develop and debug large applications.
New Operators
A number of new operators have been introduced into the language to facilitate the coder. For instance the IsNot operator facilitates comparisons with Nothing. This was not possible earlier.
Just My Code
This feature of VB.NET enables the coder to skip over all the code that was not written by him. This is extremely useful when debugging custom code as all machine generated code is avoided. This feature becomes enabled when “Enable Just My Code Stepping” option is activated. This feature is enabled by default but can be disabled by the coder if he wishes to.
Support for Generics
The .NET framework has attempted to overcome some of the limitations of VB 6 with regard to collections. Errors in object storage under a collection, which were detectable at compile time has been resolved by providing the coder with many more types of collections. The coder can now import Systems Collections namespace which gives access to BitArray, HashTable, Queue, StoredList and Stack. In other words use of Generics has solved the problems in .NET Framework 2005.
Certain new concepts have been introduced in VB.NET 2005. The Operator overloading feature allows the coder define the behavior of classes when used with intrinsic language operators such as +, -,<,>,=, and <>. The appropriate outcome for operations are defined when applied to instances for user defined classes.
The DotNet Framework architecture has revolutionized the process of application development. In the lessons that follow we will be examining in greater detail how this framework helps the Visual Basic. NET developer.
