VB .NET Language Fundamentals

Abstract

The minor mission of this chapter is to survey core syntactic changes that have been introduced to the Visual Basic programming language with the advent of VB .NET. As you will see, a number of language constructs used in earlier versions of VB have been cleaned up, removed, and improved, to produce a more consistent and elegant programming language. However, the main thrust of this chapter is to introduce you to the core aspects of the VB .NET language, including value-based and reference-based data types, the System.Object base class, and basic class construction techniques. Along the way, you also learn how to manipulate modules, strings, arrays, enumerations, and structures.