Your First VB.NET

Application

It’s time to jump in and start working with VB.NET. First, you

need to learn a little bit about the new IDE. The new VB.NET

IDE might look somewhat familiar to you, but there are some

significant changes that make it a more useful environment.

However, these changes can be frustrating to experienced VB

developers because many of the keystrokes have changed, win-dows

have different names, and the debugging tools work dif-ferently.

VB.NET is part of Visual Studio.NET (or VS.NET),

which finally consolidates all the development languages into

one place: VB.NET, C++.NET, and C#. You can even create a

single solution, containing multiple projects, in which the indi-vidual

projects are written in separate languages.

The Start Page

The very first time you start Visual Studio.NET, you are taken

to a screen that allows you to configure the IDE. That screen

is the My Profile page discussed later in the chapter. After

your first visit to the My Profile page, all subsequent starts of

Visual Studio.NET begin with the Start Page, as shown in

Figure 2.1. The start page contains a number of sections, as

indicated by the links along the left side. These sections are

" Get Started—This option allows you to open a recent

or existing project, or create a new one. No recent

projects are listed on the Get Started area shown in

Figure 2.1. As you create projects in VB.NET, this area

will display the four most recently opened projects.

This area also contains links to open an existing

CHAPTER 2

Your First VB.NET Application