The beginning of a decade splits the programming camp into two. One camp holds on to the older programming paradigms and languages on which they have spent long hours and efforts. Another camp is futuristic and looks forward to welcoming and embracing new languages and approaches to programming with open arms. Usually it’s the second camp that wins. Like it or not, beginning of the last three decades have brought about storms in the programming world. It was Unix and C at the beginning of eighties, Windows and C++ in the early nineties, and now .NET and VB.NET are all set to be the rage of the current decade.

The world and the businesses that run in this world have all become ‘Internet-centric’. It’s only natural that applications that help manage business processes have also become Internet-centric. To develop, deploy, and manage net-centric, distributed, secure and scalable applications, we need a language that addresses these issues from the design stage. VB.NET is the language of choice for tackling these concerns.

Microsoft’s .NET is a revolutionary advance in programming technology that greatly simplifies application development. In addition to providing support for traditional desktop Windows applications, it provides tremendous support for web-based services.

Microsoft’s popular Visual Basic programming language has been upgraded to take advantage of the new .NET features. Visual Basic.NET, or simply VB.NET, has become a full object-oriented programming language with features such as interfaces, inheritance and polymorphism. The result is that there is a definite learning curve for moving to VB.NET. And learning the new programming language is only part of the challenge. The much greater challenge is learning the .NET Framework and all its capabilities, including Windows Forms, Networking, XML, Security and Interoperability. This course aims to smoothen this learning curve.