Operator overloading, where you can define new meanings for operators (for example redefining the addition operator "+" to allow it to "add" two colors together to get a third color).
The IsNot keyword has been added to make your code less confusing. Now you can write:
If A IsNot B Then ...
Instead of:
If Not A is B Then ...
The Global keyword clears up a problem of not being able to use a name in one of your namespaces that is the same as a top-level namespace from the .NET Framework Library. You won't use this much until you start creating your own namespaces in programs, but it clears up something that was a problem for some programmers.
The Using Keyword improves the memory management of .NET by allowing you to tell the system when you're finished with objects that use a lot of computer resources. We see an example of this in a later part when we tell the system when we're finished with an XML object.
The Continue keyword makes coding loops less confusing by letting you to skip to the next iteration of a loop without processing the rest of the loop body. For example, you can skip the number 5 in this loop:
Do While Var < 10
Var += 1
If Var = 5 Then Continue Do
Debug.WriteLine("Var is " & CStr(Var))
Loop
You can also use Continue For and Continue While.
The VB Express development environment includes more cool tricks. We'll see more of them as we go through the rest of the tutorial. (There just isn't space enough to cover them all here!)
In Part 5 of the tutorial, The .NET Framework and Objects, we learn about the source of all this goodness, the .NET Framework. Up to this point, we have used a lot of objects, but in part 5 we also create our first new one.
