Visual Basic Guide

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Visual Basic is engineered for productively building type-safe and object-oriented applications. Visual Basic enables developers to target Windows, Web, and mobile devices. As with all languages targeting the Microsoft .NET Framework, programs written in Visual Basic benefit from security and language interoperability.

This generation of Visual Basic continues the tradition of giving you a fast and easy way to create .NET Framework-based applications.

If you don't already have Visual Basic, you can acquire a version of Visual Studio that includes Visual Basic for free from the Visual Studio site.

In This Section

Getting Started
Helps you begin working by listing what is new and what is available in various editions of the product.

Programming Concepts Presents the language concepts that are most useful to Visual Basic programmers.

Program Structure and Code Conventions
Contains documentation on the basic structure and code conventions of Visual Basic such as naming conventions, comments in code, and limitations within Visual Basic.

Visual Basic Language Features
Provides links to topics that introduce and discuss important features of Visual Basic, including LINQ and XML literals.

Visual Basic Reference
Contains the Visual Basic language and compiler information.

Developing Applications with Visual Basic
Discusses various aspects of development in Visual Basic, such as security, exception handling, and using the .NET Framework class library.

COM Interop
Explains the interoperability issues associated with creating and using component object model (COM) objects with Visual Basic.

Samples
Contains information about samples.

Walkthroughs
Provides links to step-by-step instructions for common scenarios.

Get Started Developing with Visual Studio
Provides links to topics that help you learn about the basics of Visual Studio.

.NET API Browser
Provides entry to the library of classes, interfaces, and value types that are included in the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK.