More than three years ago, the Microsoft Visual Basic team set out to create Visual Basic .NET. At that time managers would kid the development team by saying that they were making only three “simple” changes to Visual Basic 6: a new runtime system, a new development environment, and a new compiler. The Visual Basic development team spent the next three years working on one of these changes: the new compiler. Two other teams provided the development environment and runtime. As we pointed out in Chapter 1, the end result is not a new version of Visual Basic 6 but an entirely new product: Microsoft Visual Basic .NET. The name is important for two reasons. First, Visual Basic is still Visual Basic. Second, Visual Basic .NET is not Visual Basic 7.
This chapter describes the three “simple” changes made to create Visual Basic .NET, including changes to the runtime, the development environment, and the compiler. Microsoft also added other features to Visual Basic .NET along the way, including a new forms package and a new debugger, and these are also discussed in this chapter.
