6/9/2011

THE .NET REVOLUTION A Brief History of Visual Basic

• This chapter presents the “big picture” of Visual
Basic and the .NET Framework.
• You’ll get an overview of what has changed, why
it’s different, and just what life will be like in the
.NET world. Along the way, we’ll sort through
Microsoft’s newest jargon, demystifying :
– the Common Language Runtime (CLR),
– “managed” code, and the
– .NET class library.
• BASIC, a simple teaching language that
programmers once learned before graduating to
more serious languages like C.
• Visual Basic inherited at least part of the BASIC
legacy, beginning its life with the goal of being the
easiest way for anybody to program . . . anything.
• VB version 1.0, which introduced the easiest way
to create a graphical user interface;
• VB version 4.0, which provided the easiest way to
talk to a database;
• VB version 5.0, which gave us the easiest way to
go “object-oriented.”

A Brief History of Visual Basic Enter .NET

• Visual Basic.NET 1.0.
• VB versions
– That’s because VB .NET 1.0 was the first version of
• 1991 VB 1 (May) Visual Basic that broke language compatibility.
• 1992 VB 2 (Fall) – Traditional VB programming tricks and hacks
• 1993 VB 3 (Summer) either failed or risked serious side effects.

• 1995 VB 4 (August) • Visual Basic 2005 is VB .NET 2.0.

• 1997 VB 5 (February) – Microsoft marketers decided that the .NET name
was confusing so they named it VB 2005.
• 1998 VB 6 (Summer)
– Didn’t change the language to make it one bit
• 2001 VB.Net? closer to classic VB.

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Enter .NET
• Visual Basic 2005 differences are :
– a few new language frills (many of which are
introduced in Chapter 3),
– a revamped design environment (which is Visual
Studio see Chapter 2), and
– a return of the long-lost (and much-loved) run-
edit-and-continue debugging feature (Chapter 8).
• VB .NET may pose a migration challenge and a whole
new learning curve, but it also represents a major
redesign and refinement of the Visual Basic
language.
Visual Basic’s Quirky (odd) Mix
• Visual Basic last ver. (6.0) was a mixture of cutting-
edge features and old throwbacks. E.g. a great
framework for creating a graphical user interface
with configure controls and windows just by setting
properties.
• Problems
– Need of Windows API, a library of perplexing C
routines.
– “evil” type-conversion mechanism,
• easier by letting you convert data types without following
the proper rules thus allowing you to overlook serious
errors.
– Ancient practice of referring to open files with
numbers.
– World-class object-oriented programming language
still has the Goto command?
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The Limitations of “Classic” Visual Basic
• Visual Basic’s Quirky (odd) Mix
• Isolated Languages
• Enterprise Development Headaches
• DLL Hell
• Incomplete Support for Object-Oriented
Programming
Isolated Languages
• Each programming language does things a bit
differently.
• Windows programming without .NET, where:
– C++ uses the MFC library,
– J++ uses WFC, and
– Visual Basic uses its own framework (with sprinkles of the
Windows API thrown in for good measure).
• Programmers suffered endless headaches trying to
understand each other, and they had to consider the
difference and customs of every language .
• And even if a problem was solved in C++, Visual Basic
developers usually still needed to solve it all over again.
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Enterprise Development Headaches
• Three-tier design. Distributed objects. Load balancing.
It all sounds good on paper.
• Data objects reading and writing to the database,
business objects processing the results, and a Windows
application displaying the results, with everyone talking
together using the Component Object Model (COM).
• But if you’ve ever tried to create a distributed program,
you’ve probably discovered that :
– setting it up,
– registering your components, and
– maintaining version compatibility
• add a whole new set of painful problems that have
nothing to do with programming
Incomplete Support for OOP
• Before I even knew what polymorphism and
inheritance were, I knew that classic Visual
Basic didn’t have them. Never mind that VB
had all the other tools needed to write elegant
programs based on objects; there was no
escaping the talk about its OOP limitations. No
other limitation did more to crush the
personal self-esteem of the dedicated VB
programmer.
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DLL Hell
• DLL Hell is a particularly ugly example of the problem with component-
based programs.
• Most Visual Basic programs rely heavily on specialized components and
controls, sometimes without the programmer even realizing it.
• These programs work fine when the correct version of every dependent
file is present on the system,
• but if
• mistakenly some .dll is overwrites
•
• strange problems start to come out of the woodwork.
•
• Such problems are a nightmare to try and identify, and the worst part is,
they usually appear long after a fully functional application has been
installed.
• The end result?
• Fragile programs that can easily be disrupted when other applications are
updated or uninstalled.
The .NET Vision
• The Ingredients of .NET
• The Common Language Runtime (CLR)
• The .NET Classes
• Speaking the Same Language
• Deep Language Integration
• Prebuilt Infrastructure
• Web Services and the Next-Generation Internet
• Open Standards: XML, SOAP, WSDL, and Other
Letters from the Alphabet
• Metadata: The End of DLL Hell?
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The Ingredients of .NET The Ingredients of .NET

• Like COM and ActiveX, the .NET Framework
means a lot of different things, depending on
whom you talk to in Microsoft’s marketing
department. On the programming side, .NET is
made up of the:
– Common Language Runtime (CLR)
– set of unified classes.
– The .NET Framework
• .NET framework sits on top of the Windows
platform, which provides its own set of services
(e.g., IIS server built into Windows for web server).

The Common Language Runtime (CLR)
The CLR is a runtime environment that processes, executes,
and manages Visual Basic code.
It’s a little like the traditional Visual Basic runtimes (for
example, VBRUN300.dll or MSVBVM60.dll), but with
increased responsibility.
What does CLR code offer to your applications?
• prevents operations that could corrupt memory and
cause the system to become unstable.
• Automatically cleans up objects you don’t need.
• Catches common mistakes & halts your program with
an error, rather than letting it run on with scrambled
data.
• Compiles your code on the fly into native machine
code, ensuring optimum performance.
• Code that executes inside the CLR is called managed
code which works with CLR services & operates
under the CLR’s careful supervision.

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The .NET Classes
• The .NET classes contain the tools to perform
all kinds of tasks, from writing to a database to
reading from a web page.
• In the past, these capabilities either were
hard-coded into the language with special
functions, or provided through separate
components.
• Think of the integrated class library as a
supremely well-organized programming
toolbox.
Speaking the Same Language
• Within .NET, each programming language still
has its own syntax. For example, every line in a
C# program ends with a semicolon (;), unlike
Visual Basic. But these differences are really
just superficial.
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The .NET Classes
Deep Language Integration
• The power of CLR integration extends beyond the way
you code. Behind the scenes, the same engine is
processing code from different .NET languages.
• deep integration means that we can inherit procedures
and properties from classes written in C#, and that
errors thrown from code written in C# can be caught by
code written in Visual Basic.
• In fact, every CLR language compiles into same CPU-
independent byte code (creating .exe or .dll file) the
Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL or IL ).
• Different .NET languages have the same performance.
so programming in VB 2005 instead of C# 2005 is
nothing more than a lifestyle choice.
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Prebuilt Infrastructure
• Most internal business applications boil down to databases, web
development involves tackling site-management issues, & game
requires the traditional 3D-rendering engine.
• Microsoft has been successful designing some of the basic
infrastructure that we all need, creating such tools as ADO for
universal database access and COM+ for managing transactions. Web Services and the Next-Generation
• Microsoft’s philosophy is to supply the infrastructure, while the Internet
programmer writes the specific “business logic” that distinguishes
one project from the next.
• No Need to spend time wrestling with low-level details such as
state management, database-specific APIs, and messaging.
• The .NET Framework extends this philosophy with its common
class library. Here you can find cutting-edge tools for creating
everything from a Windows service to an ASP.NET web application
ready to serve thousands of eager e-shoppers.

Open Standards: XML, SOAP, WSDL, Metadata: The End of DLL Hell?
and Other Letters from the Alphabet

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Ten Enhancements You Can’t Live Without
1. Visual Basic is truly object-oriented—at last.
2. The new Windows Forms model for programming a
user interface is more powerful than ever, and
bundles convenient controls for everything from
system tray icons to print previewing to web browser
windows.
3. There’s no automatic type conversion: Option Strict
lets you turn off this dangerous “convenience.”
4. Structured error handling makes it as easy to trap an
error in Visual Basic as in any other modern
programming language.
5. ASP.NET provides the easiest and most powerful
system to date for programming web applications.
Ten Changes That May Frustrate You
1. Arrays must always have a lower boundary of 0.
2. Existing Internet projects using Web Classes or DHTML aren’t
supported, so you will need to rewrite them from scratch as
ASP.NET applications.
3. There are no more default properties, so you can’t abbreviate
Text1.Text as just Text1.
4. The techniques you used in the past to print documents, draw
graphics, read text files, and provide context-sensitive help have
changed—get ready to learn these basics all over again.
5. There is no deterministic finalization. That fancy jargon means
that when you’re finished with an object, it may still hang around
in memory for some time until it’s cleaned out. As a result, you
can’t rely on events that take place when an object is unloaded,
because they won’t occur at a predictable time.
6/9/2011
Ten Enhancements You Can’t Live Without
6. Method overloading now allows you to create different
versions of methods with the same name, but with different
arguments. Visual Basic 2005 will use the correct one
automatically.
7. Even critics can’t deny that the new development
environment is heart-stoppingly beautiful. Does any other
language offer collapsible code, intelligent dynamic help,
and an entire programming language for creating macros?
8. A new event model lets you connect multiple event handlers
to a single control and store function references in special
variables, called delegates.
9. Initializes let you set the value of a variable on the same line
where it is declared.
10. Metadata means that DLL Hell may finally be a thing of the
past. You can now set up a program just by copying its
directory—a capability that hasn’t existed in the Windows
Ten Changes That May Frustrate You
6. Older database access methods, such as RDO and DAO, are not
fully supported. (For example, they can’t be used for data
binding.)
7. Even if you use the upgrade wizard, a great deal of code may need
to be rewritten, including routines for reading from and writing to
files, and for creating printouts. In fact, for complex applications,
you may have to abandon the whole idea of migration.
8. There is no way of accessing pointers. In classic Visual Basic,
pointer access was dangerous and unsupported, but could still be
done by those who knew the “secret” functions, such as StrPtr()
and ObjPtr().
9. Goto, Gosub, and line numbers are no longer supported.
10. The model for drawing on a form has changed. If you did custom
drawing in the past, you’ll need to rewrite it from scratch.
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The Dark Side of .NET
• Not every Visual Basic programmer is happy with the radical
changes Microsoft made. To some critics, .NET’s drive to modernize
programming has left Visual Basic 2005 looking more like Java than
.NET.
• They argue that years of Visual Basic legacy are being left behind,
and that compatibility with old code is being rudely broken. There’s
more than a grain of truth to these complaints.
• So is .NET worth it? Yes. Visual Basic 2005 has changed enough to
make life a little painful for developers, but once you understand
the new changes, your coding days will be easier and more
productive. In a sense, Microsoft is gambling that developers will be
so eager to program with an elegant, revitalized version of Visual
Basic that they’ll sacrifice backward compatibility. Sometimes
change hurts.
6/9/2011
What About COM?
• COM is the Component Object Model, the fundamental technology that
allows programs to communicate together, and allows parts of programs
(their components) to interact as well. Until now, COM was supposedly
the basis of Windows programming—so where has it gone?
• This is a question that’s bound to be asked again and again. As Microsoft
points out, there are hundreds of millions of COM applications, including
such heavyweights as Microsoft Office. COM will be around as long as
Windows is around; in fact, Windows won’t boot without COM.
• That said, .NET is not built on top of COM. Programs written in .NET
communicate natively; because their languages are all based on the CLR,
they don’t need to work through obscure COM interfaces.
• In fact, .NET is really a next-generation version of COM. (At one early
stage, parts of it were even called COM+ 2.0.) But don’t panic. Microsoft
has worked long and hard to make sure that COM applications can
communicate seamlessly with .NET.
• One day you may wake up to a world without COM . . . but it won’t be any
time soon.