Visual Basic An Introduction for Beginners

Visual Basic 2008

Visual Basic 2008 is a development tool widely used to build software applications. To perform certain tasks as per the requirements. Applications can be created for the Windows operating system, the Web, hand-held devices, and a host of other environments and settings. The most important advantage of Visual Basic programming is that it has been designed to increase productivity in your daily development work—especially if you need to use information in databases or create solutions for the Internet—but an important additional benefit is that once you become comfortable with the development environment in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, you can use the same tools to write programs for Microsoft Visual C++ 2008, Microsoft Visual C# 2008, Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008, and other third-party tools and compilers.

Visual Basic .NET Versions

The 1^st version of Visual Basic .NET (Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2002) was released in February 2002. The 2nd release (Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003) was released in March 2003. Then next came Visual Basic 2005 in late 2005, and after a long period of development and integration work, Microsoft released Visual Basic 2008 in early 2008. Visual Basic 2008 is now so tightly integrated with Visual Studio that it is only available as a component in the Visual Studio 2008 programming suite, which includes Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual Web Developer, and other Microsoft .NET development tools. Visual Studio 2008 is sold in several different product configurations, including Standard Edition, Professional Edition, Team Suite, and Express Edition. I’ve written this book to be compatible with all editions of Visual Basic 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, but especially with the tools and techniques available in Visual Studio Standard Edition and Visual Studio Professional Edition. Although Visual Basic 2008 is similar in many ways to Visual Basic 2005, there are many important differences and improvements, so I recommend that you complete the exercises in this book using the Visual Basic 2008 software.