Why, you might ask, did I decide to write an entire book about Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and enterprise development? After all, enterprise development usually conjures up pictures of industrial strength computer systems, something Visual Basic has not traditionally been associated with. First of all, Visual Basic .NET is more than just an evolutionary change to the Visual Basic platform. It is now truly an enterprise-class development platform that frees the developer of many of the constraints of previous implementations. For seasoned Visual Basic developers, this platform offers so many new ways of doing things that design decisions are often trial-and-error-based. Even when design decisions are based on the developer's past experience, the fundamental differences of Visual Basic .NET mean that the "old way" is not always going to be the "right way." This is why I have written this book: to provide guidance on a number of issues based on my own past experience (and trial-and-error experience) with Visual Basic .NET. I think this is reason enough to write this book, but there is another reason.

Despite the interest in and popularity of the C# language, Visual Basic has been and remains the most accessible programming language for the Microsoft Windows platform. You do not need to be a hard-core developer to program in Visual Basic .NET. Much of the C# language syntax is nonintuitive (for those lacking a background in C/C++), and the declarative nature of the Visual Basic language (which has often been derided by more classically trained developers as being too wordy) lends itself nicely to the less experienced programmer.

There is a downside to the accessibility of the Visual Basic language: it can allow programmers with insufficient knowledge to create applications that may appear to work just fine but that suffer from severe architectural flaws, flaws that quickly make modifications or improvements to the application unmanageable and usually don't lend themselves to high performance, reliability, or scalability. This is simply because precious few technical books that are accessible to the novice programmer give programmers guidance on how to build these kinds of systems. This is the second reason for writing this book: helping developers to understand why they need to make particular design decisions as well as communicating some best practices.

Most of what I'll cover in this book applies to a broad spectrum of applications. Our discussion will focus on development for the enterprise, but you can use the advanced programming techniques and strategies presented here to write better and more sophisticated applications of all kinds in Visual Basic .NET. In addition, much of the techniques, technologies, and development approaches covered here apply equally well to all .NET languages, including C#.