Professional Visual Basic® 2010 and .NET 4

Appendix A. The Visual Basic Compiler

When the .NET Framework was first introduced, one nice addition for the Visual Basic developer was the inclusion of a standalone language compiler. This meant you were not required to have the Visual Studio .NET 2002 IDE in order to build Visual Basic applications. In fact, you could take the .NET Framework from the Microsoft website (free of charge) and build Web applications, classes, modules, and more very simply, using a text editor such as Notepad. You could then take the completed files and compile them using the Visual Basic compiler.

The Visual Basic compiler is included along with the default .NET Framework install. Each version of the framework has a new compiler. In fact, note that while the core of the .NET 3.5 release is still running on the .NET Framework 2.0, the .NET Framework 3.5 release includes new compilers for both the Visual Basic and C# languages. Similarly, version 4 of the .NET Framework also ships with a new compiler. The compiler for the .NET Framework 2.0 is vbc.exe, and it can be found at C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\vbc.exe

The compiler for the .NET Framework 4 is also called vbc.exe, and it can be found at C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0\vbc.exe

Note that on a 64-bit system you will actually find a folder for the framework under C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\V4.0. This version of the compiler runs within the 64-bit memory space, but keep in mind that Visual Studio 2010 is still a 32-bit ...