Visual Basic .NET 2008 Express - The .NET Framework and Objects

This is a free tutorial to help beginning programmers get up to speed using Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express. To get the most from this tutorial, you might want to start at the beginning:

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.

Inside the .NET Framework

The heart of VB.NET and the .NET development tools is the .NET Framework.

But what is a "Framework" exactly?

Here's a definition that was used for Java. It works pretty well for .NET too! (Many of the best concepts in .NET were proven in Java first.)

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 you supply the details. 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. Like icebergs, you normally can't see most of the .NET Framework. In this segment, we take a more detailed look at the pieces that are in the .NET Framework.

To finish up the segment, the concepts that are part of OOP - Object Oriented Programming - are introduced by coding a first object. But first, lets look at .NET as an international standard on the next page.