Summary

You have just driven by some of the most important .NET features at about 60 miles per hour. If some of the terminology seems foreign to you, do not worry. Some of it will be covered in more detail in this book. Terminology that isn't covered in more detail in this book will be covered in other books, but this book will cover the basics of what you need to know to get started using VB .NET.

For those questioning whether to move to .NET, it is important to understand the benefits .NET gives you. Having a unified debugger, gaining true multithreading, and finally having implementation inheritance are major leaps forward. The runtime also gives you a nice security framework, and you don't have to worry about registering components anymore. Web Services allows you to easily create services that are consumable over a standard HTTP connection.

As you work with VB .NET, understand that you are also working closely with the .NET Framework. It is hard to separate the two, and the more you understand about the Framework, the better VB .NET developer you will be.