Visual Basic .NET Kick Start is a rapid-progression tutorial that presents Visual Basic .NET to working programmers already familiar with another programming language or tool. This book speeds through basic concepts and focuses on practical examples showing the advantages of Visual Basic .NET in ASP programming, application design and creation, and .NET Web Services development. Because previous versions of Visual Basic are so prevalent, this book pays special attention to issues developers face when moving from VB to VB.NET. Although Visual Basic .NET Kick Start assumes no knowledge of the .NET Framework, it skips the handholding and basic programming instruction associated with entry-level tutorials. Full of code examples, tips, and professional insights, this book is about maximum payoff with minimum effort for the working programming who wants to use Visual Basic .NET now.
Visual Basic has slowly evolved over the years, incorporating a variety of features and moving itself into the world of "enterprise" development, but everything was being built on top of an already existing foundation. This is not unusual; most development tools progress in this way, but it has the unfortunate side effect of garbage accumulation. New versions of the tool try to stay compatible with, and therefore have to keep all the less-than-perfect aspects of, the previous versions. To rewrite the language from scratch is almost unthinkable. The work required would be enormous and breaking compatibility with the user's existing code is bound to make you unpopular. The benefit of such a move would be a completely clean and new implementation that can keep the good and throw away the bad parts of the existing language.