Saturday, March 15, 2014

Visual Basic .net for beginners - Part 1 : Introduction to Visual basic



This is the first chapter of the tutorial series “Visual Basic .net for beginners” . This series is for absolute beginners in programming . So no previous experience is required.  At the end of this series you will be able to build your own windows, web application in with professional quality standards. This is the introduction part of the series. In this tutorial we will take look at the features of visual basic , .net frame work, visual basic IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and many other things that a visual basic beginner should know.


What is visual basic?

No need to explain what is programming and what is the significance of programming.  Some of my friends approached me to know how to develop simple programs or software. I recommended to choose visual basic because of its ease of study  and simplicity of language. In my opinion, visual basic is one of the most user friendly programming language in the world . You can use visual basic for developing applications rapidly. There were many versions for visual basic  3,4,5,6 etc. Visual basic 6 was the last known version. After that Microsoft corporation introduced a framework called .NET.  Then they incorporated visual basic with the .net frame work.   There are also different versions for visual basic .NET. 2003,2008,2010,2012 and now 2013. If you are a learn then you can choose Visual Basic Express Editions because its free of cost. The entire series will be based on Visual Basic 2010.

What is .NET framework?

 .NET framework is nothing but a set of pre-coded stuffs. We  can use those codes in our programs. I’m not going to explain what is its architecture, how does it works and things like that because nobody likes to learn a lot of theories.

Where to start?

This is also a question for me. When I started this tutorial, I don’t know where to start. Let’s start with the variables like any programming language tutorial starts.

The environment

When you open Visual Studio IDE, you will get the following window.
visual-basic-for-beginners  


This is the screenshot of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.It shows the start page of the visual studio IDE. We will be working in this for developing windows based visual basic applications.

Understanding the environment

We can start a new project by clinking the new project link in the start page or by clicking the menu File->New Project. If you are connected to the internet you can see the latest news in the start page. There windows called Solution Explorer, Tool Box, Property window. These three windows are important to us. We will use it very frequently. Solution explorer will help us to view the files in our project, add new files to the project, add references , change project settings and so on. Tool Box contains controls that we use in the upcoming tutorials. Similarly the use of property window can be explained only after starting the project. Tool bar is also very important because the program control buttons are there. “Run, Pause Stop”

We will star programming from the next tutorial onwards.


 

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