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发信人: Junhot (倚浩), 信区: Visual
标  题: Visual Basic.NET 10 More RAD Years
发信站: 荔园晨风BBS站 (Sun Jun  3 09:22:04 2001), 转信

Visual Basic.NET
10 More RAD Years
By Ari Bixhorn

Just over 10 years ago, the process of building a simple Microsoft?
Windows?-based application could have been described as unruly,
complicated, and time-consuming. This task often required the
expertise of a select group of highly skilled developers. These
programmers and architects would be contracted to spec the assignment,
draft proposals, and then descend into dark and mysterious labs to
concoct their solution. Hundreds of lines of code and many hours later,
these revered alchemists would emerge from their labs, triumphant
with their handiwork that might have looked something like Figure 1.

(PS:Figure 1 is a "HelloWorld" Application.)

OK, I'm exaggerating, but the truth is that building Windows-based
applications was anything but trivial before the introduction of the
Visual Basic? 1.0 development system in May 1991. With Visual Basic,
programmers could, for the first time, implement Windows-based
applications in an intuitive, graphical environment simply by dragging
and dropping controls onto a form. (See Memory Bank for an interesting
view of what it was like to create a program with Visual Basic 10
years ago.)
Over the past 10 years, the Visual Basic community has grown to
represent the majority share of the developer population. During this
time, it was largely through the simplified development of
applications built with Visual Basic that Microsoft's vision for
Windows-based computing could be realized. Now, as Microsoft moves
forward with the vision of Microsoft .NET, developers using Visual Basic
can again bring about a resurgence of software development—this time,
however, with a focus on applications and services for the Web.
Visual Basic.NET delivers the most requested features to developers,
including inheritance and structured exception handling, while
maintaining its ease of use and instant accessibility. Just as
developers who use Visual Basic have always been a fundamental component
in the success of Windows, so too will they play a major role in
influencing the adoption and success of Microsoft .NET. And with
Visual Basic.NET, they will have the most powerful, modernized tools for
doing this—now and into the future.

Visual Basic.NET and the .NET Platform
The computing industry is in the midst of a revolution—one brought
about by rapidly decreasing hardware and software costs, proliferation
of handheld devices, the broad and inexpensive availability of
Internet connectivity, and the permeation of standards such as XML and
SOAP throughout the Internet. The .NET platform is designed to provide
the next generation of tools, software, and services to power this
distributed computing revolution. However, the true potential of this
technological revolution will not be determined by the business decision
makers and executives, but rather the developers implementing .NET
applications—and that is where the Visual Basic community comes in.
For years, developers using Visual Basic have benefited from having
the Visual Basic runtime obscure many aspects of the operating system
from view. This, for example, enabled them to avoid a great deal of
the plumbing and intricacies associated with COM programming. It made
their tasks easier so that concepts like GUIDs, HRESULTs, and
IUnknowns were abstracted away from the developer.
This abstraction also prevented Visual Basic-based developers from
having some of the same opportunities as programmers had in other
languages. For example, by wrapping much of the core OS functionality,
Visual Basic delayed developers from accessing many of its new operating
system features. DirectX? and custom controls were implemented in
Windows months before being wrapped and added to the Visual Basic
runtime. In addition, the Visual Basic runtime's OS abstraction made
calling to the underlying Windows APIs a very complex and error-prone
task.
Visual Basic.NET resolves these problems and gives developers
unprecedented levels of power and flexibility while maintaining the
RAD (rapid application development) experience that has benefited the
Visual Basic community. Architected from the ground up on the .NET
Framework, developers using Visual Basic.NET have direct access to the
rich set of unified libraries that provides support for security,
threading, XML, ADO.NET for data access, and ASP.NET for Web Services
and applications.

More Improvements
Since Visual Basic was architected on the Microsoft .NET Framework and
is compliant with the Common Language Specification (CLS), it can
fully interoperate with and inherit from other Microsoft .NET
languages.
Of course, the desktop application development experience is now
better than ever with Visual Basic.NET. Using the new Windows Forms
package, the in-place menu editor greatly simplifies the creation of
main menus and pop-up context menus.Visual Inheritance brings
reusability to the forms designer, and control anchoring and docking
eliminates the need for complex form resize code. The result of all
these enhancements is a modernized, simplified Visual Basic that
shatters the "Visual Basic glass ceiling" and provides RAD not only
for Windows-based development, but also for the Web.

C# and Visual Basic.NET
Just as Visual Basic.NET brings developers using Visual Basic into the
world of .NET, Microsoft's newest C-based language, C#, introduces RAD
productivity and power to the C++ community. With the introduction of
these seemingly equal languages comes the question, "Which is the more
equal?" Should developers using Visual Basic 6.0 simply upgrade to
Visual Basic.NET, or are there compelling reasons to consider learning
the C# language from scratch? In the vast majority of cases, the
answer is to upgrade to Visual Basic.NET. To better understand why,
let's examine the goals and target audiences of Visual Basic.NET and
C# as well as the feature sets and user experiences they deliver.

Merging Features
In recent years, developers using Visual Basic have told Microsoft
they require more powerful programming constructs in the language to
enable true enterprise-level development. At the same time, C++
developers have been asking that their language include new RAD features
in the IDE to improve their productivity. These were the driving design
goals that resulted in the creation of Visual Basic.NET and C#.
Based on these design goals and target audiences, Visual Basic.NET and
C# have been architected specifically for their respective developer
communities. Although the languages are almost identical in
capabilities, the user experience they deliver differ. For example,
Visual Basic-based developers will be immediately familiar with concepts
in Visual Basic.NET such as case-insensitive coding, pretty listing
(case correction and automatic indentation), late binding, and the added
code readability in Visual Basic.NET.
In addition, other features specific to Visual Basic include
background compilation (to ensure that the Task List and IntelliSense?
are always up to date), default hiding of code generated in Visual
Studio.NET, simplification of event-handling syntax, available automatic
type coercion, named and optional parameter support, and support for
modules as well as static local variables. Finally, while a small
percentage of Visual Basic syntax has been updated in Visual Basic.NET,
the code syntax and semantics are, by and large, the same. Conversely,
C# implements features that cater to the C++ development community,
such as case-sensitive coding and the ability to drop to unmanaged C++
code within the context of an application.
Because C# and Visual Basic.NET are so similar in their capabilities and
considerably different in their user experience, developers using
Visual Basic will find that the best choice for future development and
the most seamless transition to .NET programming—from the syntax to the
features to the user experience—is Visual Basic.NET. Developers
using Visual Basic 6.0 will find that the improved RAD experience and
the optional advanced features in Visual Basic.NET provide all the
functionality they will need to create powerful, scalable
enterprise-critical .NET applications. Even in rare scenarios where a
development shop knows they will need to implement part of their
application in unmanaged C++, this code can be called directly from a
Visual Basic.NET application. This seamless language interoperability is
a key component of Microsoft .NET and allows both the C++ and Visual
Basic-based developers to stay focused on the language they know.

Conclusion
Just as Visual Basic 1.0 introduced the programming world to the concept
of RAD, Visual Basic.NET will establish a new standard in rapid
application development for highly distributed Web Services and
applications. While preserving the essence of Visual Basic and providing
the best desktop application development experience for Visual
Basic-based developers, Visual Basic.NET extends the RAD experience to
the Web and provides the best upgrade path for the Visual Basic
community. With full support for object-oriented constructs, inherent
support for XML and Web Services, direct access to the .NET Framework,
new designers for Windows and Web applications, and a powerful shared
IDE, Visual Basic.NET will provide the foundation for RAD programming in
Visual Basic for the next 10 years.

--
                         战意渐去，红尘琐事不关己，归隐故里。

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