Microsoft .Net 2005 – Jus’ Drag n Drop!

You must’ve already learnt dragging yourself from one technology to another, keeping pace with last night releases every morning, if you’ve been a developer using MS Technologies for past 5 or more years.

From VB6 to VB.Net then C# and now VB2005 – it’s been the learning curve for most of the VB developers that is to shift yourself into a completely Object Oriented Paradigm.
Though it’d have been a lot easier for people working with VC++ but I think in days of successors of C++ like Java and C#, is there any need to work with C++? (I simply [don’t hate it but] fear from it.)

Let’s look at some cool new features:

ASP.Net 2.0

You can just drag n drop a menu over web forms in ASP.net just like other controls without having to learn JS a bit!(JavaScript or Jscript?- you know it better!)

You can design a ‘Master’ page and apply it’s layout to many a pages in your web-site.
‘Themes’ are there to simplify the task of applying and organizing resources of your web-design. Apart from that templates are available at Microsoft’s site to get you start some kind of web-apps. (Though I feel there’s really a need of some more good web-apps templates coz web-apps developers are not always good web-designers like me.)

SiteMapPath makes it easy to provide navigation facility in pages of your site.

The whole new category of ‘LogIn’ controls makes it very easy to develop LogIn and User Creation forms in minutes.

IDE

The IDE (the real power of MS platform) has now equipped itself with never before functionalities especially for web-apps development.

Code Snippets contain code for routine programming tasks that you can include just like controls without having to write a single line of code!

VB2005

‘My’ namespace contains classes for all type of frequently used functions in VB. It’s a speed-dial into .Net framework base class library. As VB developers kept on using VB6 functions available in .Net instead of their .Net substitutes wrapped in OO paradigm due to the hierarchy of namespace and classes to access them. This ‘MY’ namespace is the answer to those difficulties and now you can access many a frequently used things simply.

So, what’s your cup of tea for programming tasks? Here’s a lot of options available in .Net:

• VB2005 - the newest VB equipped with all of OOP features and also maintaining it’s ease-of-use n RAD style
• C# (pronounced as ‘C Sharp’) - the whole new modern OO programming language developed especially for the .Net from the scratch(or from the Java?)
• VC++ with managed extensions – too long to manage now!
• VJ# - the successor of VJ++ (Microsoft’s Java or whatever it is, I haven’t met a single guy working with it)
• Or any other third party .Net framework compliant language (If you are using one then pls tell me that why do you prefer that language?)

I feel hot with VB2005 as I’ve not been a good typist than a programmer and that’s why I don’t prefer or like Case-Sensitivity much.(Case-Sensitivity remind me of horrible grammar lessons of language studies in school days) Though someone may argue that it’s verbose but what if you can use more natural language like interface to a computer , aren’t we trying hard to achieve this? That’s make VB a perfect High Level Language.
And also - it’s not lesser than Java now.
C# is really a powerful, modern OO language, for those who wanna prove themselves a whizkid-programmer playing with curly braces can safely go for it.



If you are still working with .Net 2003 then you should drag yourself into .Net 2005 and you can reliably drop yourself here(until some next Beta release!).

Moreover you don’t need to install or have disks of complete Visual Studio 2005 instead MS has released a lightweight Visual Studio 2005 ‘Express’ Edition. You can call it a learning edition as well for which you can download and install any part of it whichever you need individually i.e. for web-apps development, you just need to have Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition and for Windows-apps development with VB2005, you need Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition and likewise other things .But don’t forget to install .Net Framework 2.0 before installing any of these products. And what’s more! Express Editions are Free Forever!!

Happy Dragging!!!