Unfortunately, as of this writing (November 2003), SharpDevelop doesn't really have a Visual Basic Windows Forms based development system. As I said in the first lesson, SharpDevelop is being created by a brave group of Free Software coders taking advantage of the fact that Microsoft has decided that it's in their interest to make the technical foundation of .NET a public standard. The SharpDevelop people are currently putting their effort behind getting their C# version to work really well. In the fairly recent past, they did have some Visual Basic Forms tools working, but rather than pursue a "two track" approach, they decided to put it all back on the shelf and bring out an improved version at some point in the future.

The About Visual Basic site is very interested in making sure that our readers are aware of all the ways they can take advantage of Visual Basic. For that reason, you can find articles at About Visual Basic tracking the progress of SharpDevelop in creating their product. So as soon as something is available, you will find an announcement at About Visual Basic!

The net result of all this is that, at the present time, you can only develop the same command line application in SharpDevelop for VB .NET that you can with the Microsoft SDK. The difference is that you can develop the system in the SharpDevelop graphical environment (even though you can't - yet - use any graphical components in your project). But there is very little difference in the resulting program. Why? Because it uses the same objects from the Microsoft .NET Framework. Every one of the SharpDevelop team members thank Microsoft every morning for Microsoft's fair minded generosity in making all this free code available to them. (Not!)

Even without the VB Forms components, the SharpDevelop system is worth a download just to see what a genuine (and free!) alternative to Microsoft Visual Studio looks like.