Visual Basic .NET 2008 Express - A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial

What's this course all about?

Microsoft has made it as easy as they can for you to learn Visual Basic .NET by giving away a really great development system absolutely free: Visual Basic .NET 2008 Express Edition. (The download link is below.) This is lesson 1 of a introduction using VB.NET Express. In this lesson, you learn what it is, how to get it, and how to get started by writing a program.

This is a free tutorial to help beginning programmers get up to speed. No textbook is required and downloadable example programs help you learn. All you have to do is download Visual Basic Express from Microsoft and start learning.

This course is also a living document. I plan to update it and extend it frequently to keep it current and add more content. (In fact, I'm updating from VB.NET 2005 to VB.NET 2008 right now. You might see "2005" in some of the later lessons. I'll get to them as soon as I can. In the meantime, be assured that not too much has changed.) If you have any suggestions about something that should be changed or added, let me know about it. The current contents of the tutorial are as follows:

Part 1 - A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial - An introduction to the course.

Part 2 - Visual Basic Fundamentals - The basics of the VB Language and How To Find More Information

Part 3 - About Programming - Software systems and the Systems Development Life Cycle.

Part 4 - What's New With Visual Basic .NET Express - Special emphasis on what's new and improved.

Part 5 - The .NET Framework and Objects - How the Framework and Objects fit into VB Express

Part 6 - Objects in Detail - Objects in software and version 1 of the Signature Block program

Part 7 - Using Data and Serializing to Files - Intro to ADO.NET, and Using Serialization in Version 2 of the Signature Block program

Part 8 - Using XML - Introduces the use of XML in VB.NET

Part 9 - Programming Logic and System Architecture - Systems: From the CPU Chip to Networks

Part 10 - Collections of Things - How to use Arrays, Collections, Stacks and Queues

Part 11 - Errors: Preventing and Handling Them - Built-In Error Prevention and Structured Error Handling

We'll take it slow in Lesson 1, but we will write a program in this lesson. The first program is probably the most basic program that it's possible to write. I'll describe every step and highlight technical terms in bold. Since we're just getting started, I don't want to leave anybody behind. Don't worry. In later lessons, the pace will pick up quite a bit.

The really good news is that Visual Basic .NET 2008 Express Edition is a great learning tool for beginners. It's based on exactly the same Framework 3.5 that the (much, much) more expensive versions are. (If you're into version numbering, this is version 9.0 of Visual Basic.) The following illustration shows the difference in the "new project" dialogs.

--------
Click Here to display the illustration
Click the Back button on your browser to return
--------

I do a lot of development using VB Express and I can give you my personal assurance that it's a first class development system with many of the features of the one that Microsoft sells for thousands of US dollars. My advice is, take advantage of Microsoft and use VB.NET 2008 Express. Buy the more expensive versions only when you absolutely have to.

(About Visual Basic is totally independent of Microsoft and as far as I'm concerned, Bill has enough money.)

As a beginners course in programming, we will be marching through a selection of the fundamentals. We'll cover how to write a program, the basics of language syntax and structure, and how to use the version of Visual Studio .NET that Visual Basic Express uses. About Visual Basic features more advanced articles on the site but this course will make a special effort not to leave beginners and students behind.

Where did Visual Basic come from?

Visual Basic was invented by Microsoft, but it's based on a much earlier language called BASIC invented by Dartmouth College professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz in 1964. Since C was invented almost ten years later, BASIC is one of the earliest computer languages. Every version of BASIC has been a revolutionary event in the history of programming from the very beginning. In fact, the version of BASIC created by Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen in February 1975 has an excellent claim to being the very first PC language since the first version was written in the native machine language for the what many consider to be the first PC, the MITS Altair 8800. Since the first PC version was written directly in machine language, nothing came before it!

The first version of Visual Basic came out in May of 1991. It was revolutionary because it gave people the ability to create Windows programs easily and quickly for the first time. Before Visual Basic, Windows programs were usually written using the complicated syntax of C++ and the even more complicated requirements of Windows. It was a tricky job for even the most experienced programmers. But Visual Basic opened Windows programming for everyone. That made it a key part of the amazing early success of Windows. People who didn't live through this era often don't understand that IBM and OS/2 had nearly all the money, most of the customers, and they made the computers. They had it all! Microsoft was a tiny, insignificant upstart by comparison. The programming universe was literally turned upside down when Windows and Visual Basic became the most successful software system in the world.

I did live through it and as I write these words, it's even hard for me to believe just how amazing that time was.

But Microsoft has never been a company that let history happen to them. They have always made their own history. In February 2002, Microsoft made a 300 billion dollar bet on a totally new technology base for their entire company. They called it .NET. Bill Gates, who usually says what he means, called .NET a "bet the company" move. If .NET had flopped, it probably would have been all over for Microsoft.

On the next page, we zero in on .NET and VB.NET 2008 Express Edition!