Overview


Visual Basic (VB) has become the most popular programming language for several reasons. 

VB is easy to learn, which makes it an excellent tool for understanding programming concepts. In addition, it has evolved into such a powerful and popular product that skilled Visual Basic programmers are in demand in the job market.

Visual Basic .Net is practically a new language. Microsoft has completely rewritten the language to be fully object-oriented, compatible with many other languages using the new .Net Framework. This incorporates the object-oriented concepts throughout, as well as the new syntax and terminology of the language.

Visual Basic .Net is designed to allow the programmer to develop applications that run under Windows and/or in a Web browser without the complexity generally associated with programming.

Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET), is an object-oriented computer programming language that can be viewed as an evolution of the classic Visual Basic (VB), which is implemented on the .NET Framework. 

Microsoft currently supplies two major implementations of Visual Basic: Microsoft Visual Studio, which is commercial software and Microsoft Visual Studio Express, which is free of charge. 
Microsoft implementation of Visual Basic .NET is called "Microsoft Visual Basic".

System and Hardware Requirements
  • System
    • Windows XP Service Pack 2 or above (for 2010 release, Service Pack 3)
    • Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 or above
    • Windows Server 2003 R2 or above
    • Windows Vista
    • Windows Server 2008
    • Windows 7
  • Hardware
    • Minimum: 1.6 GHz CPU, 384 MB RAM, 1024×768 display, 5400 RPM hard disk
    • Recommended: 2.2 GHz or higher CPU, 1024 MB or more RAM, 1280×1024 display, 7200 RPM or higher hard disk

Versions

There are four versions and five releases of Visual Basic .NET implemented by the Visual Basic Team.

Visual Basic .NET 2003 (VB 7.1)

Visual Basic .NET 2003 was released with version 1.1 of the .NET Framework. New features included support for the .NET Compact Framework and a better VB upgrade wizard. Improvements were also made to the performance and reliability of the .NET IDE (particularly the background compiler) and runtime. In addition, Visual Basic .NET 2003 was available in the Visual Studio.NET Academic Edition (VS03AE). VS03AE is distributed to a certain number of scholars from each country without cost.

Visual Basic 2005 (VB 8.0)

Visual Basic 2005 is the name used to refer to the Visual Basic .NET, Microsoft having decided to drop the .NET portion of the title.
For this release, Microsoft added many features, including:
  • Edit and Continue
  • Design-time expression evaluation.
  • The My pseudo-namespace (overview, details), which provides:
    • easy access to certain areas of the .NET Framework that otherwise require significant code to access
    • dynamically-generated classes (notably My.Forms)
  • Improvements to the VB-to-VB.NET converter
  • The Using keyword, simplifying the use of objects that require the Dispose pattern to free resources
  • Just My Code, which when debugging hides (steps over) boilerplate code written by the Visual Studio .NET IDE and system library code
  • Data Source binding, easing database client/server development

Visual Basic 2008 (VB 9.0)

Visual Basic 9.0 was released together with the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 on 19 November 2007.
For this release, Microsoft added many features, including:
  • A true conditional operator, "If(condition as boolean, truepart, falsepart)", to replace the "IIf" function.
  • Anonymous types
  • Support for LINQ
  • Lambda expressions
  • XML Literals
  • Type Inference
  • Extension methods

Visual Basic 2010 (VB 10.0)

In April 2010, Microsoft released Visual Basic 2010. Microsoft had planned to use the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) for that release but shifted to a co-evolution strategy between Visual Basic and sister language C# to bring both languages into closer parity with one another. Visual Basic's innate ability to interact dynamically with CLR and COM objects has been enhanced to work with dynamic languages built on the DLR such as IronPython and IronRuby. The Visual Basic compiler was improved to infer line continuation in a set of common contexts, in many cases removing the need for the "_" line continuation character. Also, existing support of inline Functions was complemented with support for inline Subs as well as multi-line versions of both Sub and Function lambdas.


Source: wikipedia

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