Visual Basic .NET (VB.Net) is an object-oriented computer language that can be viewed as an evolution of Microsoft's Visual Basic (VB) implemented on the Microsoft .NET framework. Its introduction has been controversial, as significant changes were made that broke backward compatibility with VB and caused a rift within the developer community.
VB.Net was designed, as part of the Microsoft's .NET product group, to make Web services applications easier to develop. According to Microsoft, VB .Net was re-engineered, rather than released as VB 6.0 with added features, to facilitate making fundamental changes to the language. VB.Net is the first fully object-oriented programming (OOP) version of Visual Basic, and as such, supports OOP concepts such as abstraction, inheritance, polymorphism, and aggregation.
We have been programming in Visual Basic since version 3.0, and even though VB.Net is a large syntactical leap from VB 6.0. the last non-.Net version of VB, there are enough similarities to make for an easy transition of our code libraries.
The great majority of VB.NET developers use Visual Studio .NET as their integrated development environment (IDE). SharpDevelop provides an open-source alternative IDE.