James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
The launch of Visual Studio .NET in early February marked a radical overhaul for the entire Visual Studio range, both in terms of the underlying architecture, and the rapid development environment. The product is now based on the .NET Framework, which brings significant benefits for developers. However, for the first time ever, the compilers for the Microsoft languages are available for free by downloading the Framework SDK; by purchasing Visual Studio .NET you are no longer paying for the languages, but only the IDE and it's associated tools. As a result, developers are no longer restricted to using this IDE; in fact, the whole development process could take place using Notepad and a command line prompt. For the moment, however, Visual Studio .NET is the only rapid development tool for serious Microsoft developers, and this latest release only serves to consolidate its position.
The .NET Framework, and as a result, Visual Studio.NET comes with two new languages; C# and VB.net; and has the possibility of increasing support when other vendors release a .NET version of another language. Just a quick warning to VB programmers at this stage; you may well have been wondering why I called VB.net a "new" language... however, the language has had such a major overhaul in order to make it a truly object orientated language, that it can't be seen as anything else. As a result of these changes Visual Studio .NET will not necessarily be able to open and run your old VB projects; although it does have a conversion wizard, don't expect the transition to be easy for anything but the most basic projects.
The Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard
Installation was painless, but lengthy, with 5 CD's worth in the Professional edition. The first difference immediately noticable is you only have 2 main shortcuts created, reflecting the fact that Visual Studio is now a truly integrated development environment... from web services, sql server projects and client applications, everything can be managed from within the single IDE.
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