From Dan Mabbutt,
Your Guide to Visual Basic.
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Visual Basic 2005 is clearly a PhD product.

(Regular readers know that this is one of my favorite jokes. I first heard it many years ago during my own graduation ceremony. The speaker was congratuating everyone who would receive BS, MS, or PhD degrees and he observed that everyone knew what "BS" was. He then went on to say that "MS" was just "More of the Same" and "PhD" was the same stuff again, just "Piled higher and Deeper".)

Microsoft has really heaped it on with Visual Basic 2005. Since the underlying technology, Framework 2.0, is just the sum of their real-world experience with Framework 1.x rather than anything revolutionary, Microsoft has concentrated on loading Visual Studio 2005 with new goodies for this version. Here's my personal list of the top new things that you can find with emphasis on things that were not there in Visual Basic 2003. Keep in mind that this is just a partial list. There are actually a lot more.

In this article, I'll give you a brief description of most of them and then cover ...

• Edit and Continue
• Code Snippets
• Visual Basic Language Changes

... in more detail since these two seem to me to be more significant than the rest.