This is a free tutorial to help beginning programmers get up to speed using Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 Express. To get the most from this tutorial, you might want to start at the beginning. A complete index to the course is also in the front of the first lesson.
Part 1 - A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial - An introduction to the course.
Inside the .NET Framework
The heart of VB.NET and the .NET development tools is the .NET Framework.
But what is a "Framework" exactly? This is an example of a standard definition:
A framework is a set of common and prefabricated software building blocks that programmers can use, extend or customize for specific computing solutions.
In other words, a framework gives you the overall structure and a lot of the tools. You supply details that customize the solution for your problem. The .NET Framework is extraordinary because "overall" really does mean over all.
Here's my "block diagram" of the .NET Framework architecture:
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As you can see, Visual Basic and indeed, any .NET language is only the top layer on a pretty incredible (and growing) body of software. Recently, major components like WPF, WCF, and WF have been added. Like icebergs, you normally don't see most of the .NET Framework because it's hidden 'under the surface'. In this part of the tutorial, we take a more detailed look at the pieces that are in the .NET Framework and OOP - Object Oriented Programming.
At the end of thius this lesson, the concepts that are part of OOP are introduced by recoding the example from the first lesson as an object. But first, lets look at .NET as an international standard on the next page.
