Visual Basic® .NET by Example

Under the Covers

I sort of skimmed over the details of what happens under the covers during the build process on purpose so that you could focus more on understanding the process of building rather than low-level details of what's happening. Now that you have gone through the process of building and running the application let's take a look at what's happening so that you can appreciate some of the major improvements of Microsoft .NET.

Existing Visual Basic developers are aware that they can build their projects into P-Code or directly into Native code. P-Code is an intermediate step between your Visual Basic code and Native code. P-Code is then compiled at runtime by the Visual Basic runtime services into Native code. Native code is the format ...