The Way Things Were

For most of Visual Basic's history, you did not need to specify you were building a rich-client application—all the applications you built were rich-client apps. Web development has never been the purpose of Visual Basic. This focus on developing stand-alone or client/server applications with a Windows user interface created a very tight bond between the VB language and the forms engine within it. There was no need to distinguish between the language and the tools for building an interface in VB6, but there certainly is in .NET.

In Visual Basic .NET, the technologies that enable you to create “standard” windows applications are part of the .NET Framework, available to any .NET language. This is a huge change from the way things ...

Get Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET 2003 Kick Start now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.