Visual Basic 2008

Microsoft Visual Basic .NET first appeared in February 2002 and was the successor to the highly popular Visual Basic 6. Visual Basic .NET has undergone an evolutionary process, and is now only available as an integral component of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 suite of applications, which includes Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual Web Developer, and other development tools. Microsoft have made the Express version of their Visual Studio 2008 software available for non-commercial use free of charge, which is very good news for students and others wishing to learn how to program with Visual Basic 2008. For this reason the sample code and programs provided in these pages have all been developed using the Express version of Visual Basic 2008.

Those familiar with Visual Basic 6 will find many changes in Visual Basic 2008, most of which are designed to put VB on an equal footing with more "traditional" object oriented programming languages, like C++. Many familiar controls and other features are still to be found, but there have been significant changes in, for example, program syntax. Note also that the recommended hardware specification includes a 2.2 GHz or faster processor, with 1024 Mb RAM or above.