What is Visual Studio.NET ?

Many people always get confused with Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET) and .NET technology. VS.NET is just an editor, provided by Microsoft to help developers write .NET programs easily. VS.NET editor automatically generates lot of code, allows developers to drag and drop controls to a form, provide short cuts to compile and build the application etc.
VS.NET is not a required thing to do .NET programming. You can simply use a notepad or any other simple editor to write your .NET code!!! And you can compile your .NET programs from the command prompt.

Well, what I said is true theoretically.. but if you decide to use notepad for .NET programming, by the time you develop few sample applications, Microsoft would have introduced some other new technology and .NET would be outdated. You may not want that. So, let us go by VS.NET, just like every other .NET guys.


.NET supported languages

Currently .NET supports the following languages:

C#

VB.NET

C++

J#

The above languages are from Microsoft. Many third parties are writing compilers for other languages with .NET support.Difference between VB and VB.NETBelieve us, there is not much in common between VB and VB.NET other than the name. VB.NET is a totally new programming language. It just retains the syntax of old VB. So, if you are a vb programmer, probably you may like VB.NET than C# just because of the syntax.

In addition to this, VB.NET still support many of the old VB functions just for backward compatibility. But if you are a serious .NET programmer, we strongly suggest never use old VB functions in VB.NET. So, switching from VB to VB.NET is just like learning a new programming language, with very small similarities between them.