Summary

Visual Basic, Visual Studio, .NET, and ADO.NET are powerful tools that work very well together. The Npgsql .NET data provider fits perfectly in the .NET data architecture. If you have Visual Basic .NET and you're building applications that only need to run on Windows, you can use these tools to build robust client applications in very little time.

If you're building applications that must run on platforms other than Windows, you can still use the .NET architecture and the Npgsql data provider. The Mono project is an open-source implementation of the .NET tools and framework. Mono runs on a number of different operating systems (Linux, Apple's OS X, BSD, and Windows) and you can build a .NET application on one platform and run it on all others without recompiling. Mono does not include all of the .NET framework components, but the number of classes packaged with Mono is increasing every day. You can find more information about Mono at www.go-mono.com.