Visual Studio 2010 is an exciting version for the Visual Basic language, which reaches a double
digit version in Visual Basic 10. This is a phenomenal achievement for a programming language,
and it demonstrates the enormous utility that the language continues to provide, year after year.
Visual Basic has always been a premier tool for making Microsoft platforms accessible and easy
to use. And even though the specific technologies and devices have changed over time, the core
mission of Visual Basic has remained the same. Starting in 1991 with Visual Basic 1 and continuing
through to Visual Basic 3, Visual Basic revolutionized Windows application development by making
it accessible in a way that simply wasn’t possible before its arrival. Moving forward to Visual Basic 4
through Visual Basic 6, the language greatly simplified component programming with the Component
Object Model (COM), Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) automation, and ActiveX controls.
Finally, with Visual Basic 7 and beyond, the language has enabled developers to take advantage
of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and many .NET Framework technologies. This book covers
examples of this, using Visual Basic to access .NET Framework data types, Language Integrated
Query (LINQ), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and the Task Parallel Library. LINQ in particular
has had a significant impact on the language, providing a unified way to access data from
objects, XML, or relational data sources. One of the most revolutionary features introduced as part
of LINQ is XML literals, which makes Visual Basic the most productive language for programming
with XML.
Looking ahead, there are three major development trends that we see influencing the Visual Basic
language, now and in the future: declarative, dynamic, and concurrent programming.
Declarative programming lets developers state what the program should do, rather than requiring
them to specify in great detail how the compiler should do it. This has always been a design
principle for Visual Basic, in which we strive to increase the expressiveness of the language so that
you can “say more with less code.” Some recent examples of this in Visual Basic 9 are LINQ and
type inference. Visual Basic 10 introduces similar efficiencies with multi-line lambdas, array literals,
collection initializers, autoimplemented properties, and implicit line continuation—all of which are
covered in this book.
Dynamic programming is another style that has influenced the design of Visual Basic. Late binding
is an important feature that has made Visual Basic a great language for Microsoft Office development
and COM programming. In Visual Basic 10, we extended Visual Basic’s late-binding support
to work with other dynamic type environments, such as JavaScript and IronPython. This was made
possible by the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR), which was introduced in .NET Framework 4.
Finally, concurrency is an undeniable trend that we see influencing many forms of development.
Whether your application is running on a multicore machine, a clustered environment on premises,
via distributed computing in the Cloud, or even on a single-core computer performing IO-bound
operations, concurrency can help speed up its execution. .NET Framework 4 provides some great
tools for concurrent programming, such as the Task Parallel Library and Parallel LINQ. Part VI of this
book shows how to use these technologies in Visual Basic.