Evolving to .NET

H o m e

E v o l v i n g T o . N E T - P a r t 3

Finding YOUR Top 10 Reasons to Adopt Visual Basic .NET

By Michael McIntyre

This is the third in a series of articles which discuss evolving to VB.NET from a previous version of Visual Basic.

To come up with your own ‘personal’ top 10 reasons to upgrade to Visual Basic.NET you need: 1) a fairly detailed list of the VB.NET, Visual Studio.NET, and .NET Framework features and 2) a basic idea of what can be done with each feature. This will be your “.NET Feature Shopping List” from which you choose the features that you need or want.

From your shopping list you will select just the features that will actually benefit you. To be beneficial to YOU a .NET feature must be: 1) a superior way to do something that can already be done in VBC or; 2) a new capability that is not available in VBC - PLUS the feature must be must be something you need, or will need, in the not-to-distant future.

To get you started with your “.NET Feature Shopping List”, this and the next several articles in this series will present some, but not all, of the many features in .NET that MAY be of use to you.

For the most part the features that will be presented are new features that did not exist in Visual Basic 6. The balance of the features presented will be .Net features that provide a superior way to do something that can be done in Visual Basic 6. Superior means new useful capabilities, simpler to use, faster performance, less error prone, and so forth.

	.NET Technology	Feature	Example Benefit
1	Windows Forms	Use inheritance to add data members, properties, methods, and events to controls provided by Microsoft.	Create your own Windows Forms controls without having to start from scratch.
2	XML	Use the built-in XML serializer to write/read objects as XML to/from a file.	Pass objects as XML to other applications. Use it as a new way to persist application data.
3	ADO.NET	Use the DataSet to write/read relational data to/from files.	Create a light-weight database for an application.
4	Visual Studio.NET	Develop DLLs, a Windows Forms application, a Web Forms application, and some web services at the same time in one Visual Studio.NET solution.	Develop a common data tier that works with DLLs, a Windows Forms application, a Web Forms application, and some web services.
5	.NET Framework	Use the .NET ‘Delegate’ type to run a background task while a user continues to use the application interface.	Create user interfaces that are not blocked by long running processes such as data access.
6	.NET CLR	Use multiple CLR ‘AppDomain’ objects to create end user applications that can be automatically updated to a newer version from an intranet or internet server.	Automate deployment of application updates.
7	.NET Framework	Use .Net ‘CollectionBase’ type instead of VB.NET ‘Collection’ type to create collections.	Create higher performance collections with many new capabilities.
8	.NET Framework	Mark your code with .NET ‘Attribute’ types to modify and extend debugging capability.	Customize debugging to your programming style and to fit the need each application you program. Find bugs faster.
9	Windows Forms	Use the ‘DataGrid’ control to create ‘drill-down’ views of data.	Add ‘drill-down’ views without third-party controls.
10	Security	Mark you code with .NET ‘code access security’ attributes to protect your application in an entirely new way.	Who doesn’t need better application security these days?
11	.NET CLR	‘Just-in-Time’ compilation to processor specific machine code.	Create machine code that compiles optimized to the processor(s) installed on the computer running the code.
12	.NET Framework	Use either VB.NET functions or their .NET Framework equivalents depending on which is best for the application you are writing.	Write code quicker, that executes faster, and better fits each programming task.