Initial Thoughts

I've just started to use VB.Net for a project recently and had some thoughts on it that I wanted to record. I have earlier versions of VB before, but the .Net framework is a lot different than previous versions of VB. In previous versions you compiled the VB code into a .exe or .dll that ran against the Win32 environment and it was compiled down to the native machine instructions. The .Net environment is very similar to the Java environment in that the code is compiled into virtual machine instructions to run on a virtual machine instead of the native microprocessor. This idea wasn't invented with Java, not by a long shot. This idea is used in Smalltalk, developed in the late 70's, and the UCSD Pascal system used this concept back in the early 70's. There are probably lots of other examples.

One fairly unique thing is that the .Net system initially came out with a number of languages (C++, J++, C#, and VB.Net) that could be compiled to run on the Common Language Runtime (CLR) machine. I've just heard of other languages (including Smalltalk) that can be compiled to run on the CLR. I've also learned that Sun is working on tool to compile VB.Net source code so that it can run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). I'm not sure why you'd want to do that... I guess if you are comfortable coding in VB but want it to run on a client's machine that doesn't have the .Net infrastructure on it. Supposedly .Net has been ported to other machines, but I suspect 99.9% of .Net machines are Windows machines.

Anyway, the new Express development environments for .Net are really slick and free. This environment is very powerful and I like the tools a lot, though I'm constantly baffled by the lack of a hierarchy browser in most modern object oriented development tools. This seems bizarre to me and I really miss it from my Smalltalk days.