Visual Basic is the most successful software language known in the history of the Universe!

That might seem a little over the top ... but it's literally true. We don't know anything about software languages on other planets, but VB is the most successful way to program here on Earth.

This course is designed to introduce beginners to Visual Basic .NET. By "beginners", I mean someone who has some familiarity with programming, but no experience with VB.NET. The goal for this tutorial is VB.NET - not basic programming concepts - so we won't cover "how to program a loop." (But check out our tutorial designed for people who have never written a program at this address!) We will write a basic VB.NET program that doesn't assume that you already know how to write one.

To make this as simple as possible, we start out by showing you how to write VB.NET programs that run "from the Command Prompt" - that is, not in a window. To do this, you don't need the full graphical development tool, Visual Studio (which is bundled with VB.NET). Later on, we show you a pretty sophisticated VB.NET program that also runs at the Command Prompt. Even if you have purchased the full graphical Visual Studio, it's still a good idea to start with Command Prompt applications because you learn more about how VB.NET actually works that way. But since many of you probably signed up for this course to learn how to use the Visual Studio tools, the last segment (lesson 4) concentrates on using Visual Studio.

And one more thing. I make a special effort to cover how to do it "on the cheap". I don't assume that everyone has a corporate budget to buy all of Microsoft's latest software! They don't make it easy ... but there are a few tricks you can use.

Through six major releases, Visual Basic has gained in popularity and power until it reached a crescendo of popularity with Visual Basic 6.0. And just as it did, Microsoft decided to THROW IT ALL AWAY and replace the whole thing with new and different programming language which they decided to call VB.NET! VB.NET is so different from Visual Basic 6.0 that even Microsoft people have been heard to say that it is easier for someone with no background at all in VB 6 to learn VB.NET because they have less to 'unlearn' that way.

Why did they do it?

They had no choice.

VB 6 had become like the dinosaurs that were the most successful animals on Earth for 150 million years, but died out anyway just as the most advanced dinosaurs came onto the scene. Think of VB 6 as being kinda like Tyrannosaurus Rex. (Lots of Java programmers might agree with you and we need all the agreement we can get in software development!)

Microsoft decided that it would be far, far better if they killed their own product with their own even better product than see it get killed by somebody else's better product. And VB 6 was starting to get killed. If you were watching, the future was clear. And nobody has ever accused Microsoft of not watching. (By the way, the official Microsoft position is that they will support, but not upgrade, VB 6 until 2005 - but it seems to me that they're actively undermining VB 6 right now anyway.)

The good news is that Microsoft did it right! VB.NET is an excellent new direction and once you "make it over the hump" and really get the new vision, you'll be glad you did. The goal of this course is to "get you over that hump". Let's get started.