The purpose of this book is to provide experienced software developers with the means to quickly become productive in Microsoft's Visual Basic .NET development environment. The only assumption I make about you as a programmer is that you're comfortable with the concepts and processes of software development. This book will not teach you how to program. However, if you're currently a working Visual Basic, C++, or Java developer, this book will help you transfer your existing skills to this new environment.

With its release for the .NET platform, the Visual Basic language has undergone dramatic changes. For example: • The language itself is now fully object-oriented. • Applications and components written in Visual Basic .NET have full access to the .NET Framework, an extensive class library that provides system and application services. • All applications developed using Visual Basic .NET run within a managed runtime environment, the .NET common language runtime. In this introduction, I briefly discuss these changes and other changes before showing you three very simple, but complete, Visual Basic .NET applications.