VB.Net - Environment

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we will discuss the tools available for creating VB.Net applications. We have already mentioned that VB.Net is part of .Net framework and used for writing .Net applications. Therefore before discussing the available tools for running a VB.Net program, let us understand how VB.Net relates to the .Net framework. The .Net Framework The .Net framework is a revolutionary platform that helps you to write the following types of applications: Windows applications Web applications Web services The .Net framework applications are multi-platform applications. The framework has been designed in such a way that it can be used from any of the following languages: Visual Basic, C#, C++, Jscript, and COBOL, etc. All these languages can access the framework as well as communicate with each other. The .Net framework consists of an enormous library of codes used by the client languages like VB.Net. These languages use object-oriented methodology. Following are some of the components of the .Net framework: Common Language Runtime (CLR) The .Net Framework Class Library Common Language Specification Common Type System Metadata and Assemblies Windows Forms ASP.Net and ASP.Net AJAX ADO.Net Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Windows Presentation Foundation Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) LINQ For the jobs each of these components perform, please see ASP.Net - Introduction, and for details of each component, please consult Microsoft's documentation. Integrated Development Environment (IDE) For VB.Net Microsoft provides the following development tools for VB.Net programming: Visual Studio 2010 (VS) Visual Basic 2010 Express (VBE) Visual Web Developer The last two are free. Using these tools, you can write all kinds of VB.Net programs from simple command-line applications to more complex applications. Visual Basic Express and Visual Web Developer Express edition are trimmed down versions of Visual Studio and has the same look and feel. They retain most features of Visual Studio. In this tutorial, we have used Visual Basic 2010 Express and Visual Web Developer (for the web programming chapter). You can download it from here. It gets automatically installed in your machine. Please note that you need an active internet connection for installing the express edition. Writing VB.Net Programs on Linux or Mac OS Although the.NET Framework runs on the Windows operating system, there are some alternative versions that work on other operating systems. Mono is an open-source version of the .NET Framework which includes a Visual Basic compiler and runs on several operating systems, including various flavors of Linux and Mac OS. The most recent version is VB 2012. The stated purpose of Mono is not only to be able to run Microsoft .NET applications cross-platform, but also to bring better development tools to Linux developers. Mono can be run on many operating systems including Android, BSD, iOS, Linux, OS X, Windows, Solaris and UNIX. VB.Net - Program Structure Before we study basic building blocks of the VB.Net programming language, let us look a bare minimum VB.Net program structure so that we can take it as a reference in upcoming chapters. VB.Net Hello World Example A VB.Net program basically consists of the following parts: Namespace declaration A class or module One or more procedures Variables The Main procedure Statements & Expressions Comments Let us look at a simple code that would print the words "Hello World": Imports System Module Module1 'This program will display Hello World Sub Main() Console.WriteLine("Hello World") Console.ReadKey() End Sub End Module When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result: Hello, World! Let us look various parts of the above program: The first line of the program Imports System is used to include the System namespace in the program. The next line has a Module declaration, the module Module1. VB.Net is completely object oriented, so every program must contain a module of a class that contains the data and procedures that your program uses. Classes or Modules generally would contain more than one procedure. Procedures contain the executable code, or in other words, they define the behavior of the class. A procedure could be any of the following: Function Sub Operator Get Set AddHandler RemoveHandler RaiseEvent The next line( 'This program) will be ignored by the compiler and it has been put to add additional comments in the program. The next line defines the Main procedure, which is the entry point for all VB.Net programs. The Main procedure states what the module or class will do when executed. The Main procedure specifies its behavior with the statement Console.WriteLine("Hello World") WriteLine is a method of the Console class defined in the System namespace. This statement causes the message "Hello, World!" to be displayed on the screen. The last line Console.ReadKey() is for the VS.NET Users. This will prevent the screen from running and closing quickly when the program is launched from Visual Studio .NET. vb.net programming