what will the next version of Visual Basic - VB.Net - give
us? Let's review everything what we know so far...
- Co-existence - you'll be able to install Visual Basic 6.0 and
VB.Net on the same machine without conflicts
- Structured Error Handling – the new version will support
Try, Catch and Finally error handling techniques, as found in C++ and
Java
- Auto Upgrade – when you open a VB6 project in VB.Net, many
of the features no longer supported with be automatically upgraded
- Control Anchors – you can anchor a control to an area of
the screen, such as the lower right hand corner of a form - and it
will stay there, even if the form is resized
- No PrintForm – you'll no longer find a PrintForm method in
VB.Net – and there's no replacement planned
- Web Forms – develop applications for the Internet in your
favourite programming language, integrated with ASP.Net
- ADO.Net – improved ADO performance apparently, though no
further detail yet
- Integer to Short – the present-day 16-bit Integer will
become Short, whilst the 32-bit Long will turn into an Integer. The
Long data type will remain in existence as a 64-bit number
- No GoTo – this statement will no longer exist
- Zero-Based Arrays – you can no longer declare arrays
between your own boundaries, they all must be zero-based. This also
means the Option Base statement serves no purpose, hence will be
removed
- Different Property Procedures – the Get and Let parts of a
property procedure will all be placed inside the one property
declaration, no longer separated into two
- No More Defaults – don't rely on default properties in
VB.Net – they won't work. You must explicitly specify everything you
use, such as Text1.Text = "MyText" rather than simply Text1
= "MyText"
- New Forms – no more regular forms, enter stage right -
all-singing, all-dancing generic Windows Forms
- Context Menus – Windows Forms have one main menu and a
separate context menu for popups, both of which you can change via a
new built-in on-form editor
- Goodbye Variant – there'll be no more Variant data type,
though the Object type will now be able to hold a primitive data type,
Empty, Nothing, Null or a reference to an object
- Improved Operations – new clipboard and drag-and-drop
features
- Web Services – easily expose your objects via the Web with
the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
- No DAO/RDO Binding – don't upgrade straight away if your
application uses DAO/RDO data controls
- Unified IDE – all Microsoft languages will use the same
development environment
- Extensibility Model – all Microsoft development
environments will have the same extensibility object model, allowing
you to, say, write a C++ add-in within Visual Basic
- Easier Deployment – you can register components by simply
copying them into a directory, no more regsvr32.exe
- No OLE Container – this control has been removed
- New Graphics Methods – which will replace Circle, CLS,
PSet, Line and Point
- No Shape or Line Controls – all removed
- Inheritance – object-orientated buzzword that means you can
derive a class from its parent class
- Short-Circuit Evaluation – If you run this code in Visual
Basic 6, it will gets the result of both functions, then evaluate
them: If Function1() And Function2() Then ... but in VB.Net, if the
first call returns a False, the operation is immediately aborted
- Miscellaneous – Initialise variable values on the same
line as you declare them. No more fixed-length strings. No fixed-size
arrays when using UDTs. No GoSub/Return. No VarPtr, ObjPtr, StrPtr and
such. No more LSet. No more 'As Any' declarations. Setting a Timer to
0 will no longer disable it. Windows forms will not support DDE. The
Name property will no longer by available at runtime. True will no
longer equal 1, it will equal –1. In VB.Net, adding a Null to
another string will generate a mismatch error, whereas currently the
whole concatenation operation would return a Null. And, Or, Not and
Xor will no longer be Boolean operators – they will be replaced with
BitAnd, BitOr, BitNot and BitXor
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Prepare
for VB.Net Now!
