Visual Basic 6.0 Downloads - MSDN - Microsoft

Used to enable phased migration, this free add-in for Visual Studio simplifies the process of displaying .NET forms and controls in a Visual Basic 6 application.Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) is an object-oriented computer programming language that can be viewed as an evolution of the classic Visual Basic (VB), implemented on the .NET Framework. Microsoft currently supplies two main editions of IDEs for developing in Visual Basic: Microsoft Visual Studio 2012, which is commercial software and Visual Basic Express Edition 2012, which is free of charge. The command-line compiler, VBC.EXE, is installed as part of the freeware .NET Framework SDK. Mono also includes a command-line VB.NET compiler. Whether Visual Basic .NET should be considered as just another version of Visual Basic or a completely different language is a topic of debate. Apart from certain methods that have been moved and those that can be automatically converted, the basic syntax of the language has not seen many changes that "break" compatibility. There are new additions to support new features, such as structured exception handling and short-circuited expressions. Also, two important data-type changes occurred with the move to VB.NET: compared to VB6, the Integer data type has been doubled in length from 16 bits to 32 bits, and the Long data type has been doubled in length from 32 bits to 64 bits. This is true for all versions of VB.NET. A 16-bit integer in all versions of VB.NET is now known as a Short. Similarly, the Windows Forms GUI editor is very similar in style and function to the Visual Basic form editor.
The version numbers used for the new Visual Basic (7, 7.1, 8, 9, ...) clearly imply that it is viewed by Microsoft as still essentially the same product as the old Visual Basic.The things that have changed significantly are the semantics—from those of an object-based programming language running on adeterministic, reference-counted engine based on COM to a fully object-oriented language backed by the .NET Framework, which consists of a combination of the Common Language Runtime (a virtual machine using generational garbage collection and a just-in-time compilation engine) and a far larger class library. The increased breadth of the latter is also a problem that VB developers have to deal with when coming to the language, although this is somewhat addressed by the My feature in Visual Studio 2005.The changes have altered many underlying assumptions about the "right" thing to do with respect to performance and maintainability. Some functions and libraries no longer exist; others are available, but not as efficient as the "native" .NET alternatives. Even if they compile, most converted VB6 applications will require some level of refactoring to take full advantage of the new language. Documentation is available to cover changes in the syntax, debugging applications, deployment and terminology.Microsoft had planned to use the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) for that release but shifted to a co-evolution strategy between Visual Basic and sister language C# to bring both languages into closer parity with one another. Visual Basic's innate ability to interact dynamically with CLR and COM objects has been enhanced to work with dynamic languages built on the DLR such as IronPython and IronRuby. The Visual Basic compiler was improved to infer line continuation in a set of common contexts, in many cases removing the need for the "_" line continuation character. Also, existing support of inline Functions was complemented with support for inline Subs as well as multi-line versions of both Sub and Function lambdas.

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