Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Standard

I went to the exe file that was in my programs folder and moved it to my desktop. Guess what? You can't even move the exe file and have a program run like a normal exe file. Creating your own programs for fun that you can share with others is not doable with this product, which is what I wanted.

My advice is, stick to VB 6 if you don't need this for work or school and haven't upgraded to Windows XP,


A not so Basic BASIC   October 21, 2002
 8 out of 9 found this review helpful

First: Be aware you must have Windows XP Pro, not the home edition.(or one of the other OS's listed).
This is an OK system. I only bought it because I could not get Visual Basic 6.
This is nothing like the earlier BASIC systems. For example: it take a full page of code just to print one line to a printer.
Somewhere along the line Microsoft has forgotten the concept that BASIC stands for Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. This is a complex language intended to produce Web XML pages. It integrates Microsofts TOTAL demand to stick to windows and windows forms.
This also comes with ZERO documentation. There is a small book to get you started on a simple project, but the on-line reference is useless.
Plan on spending [money] on books including a language reference to even do the simplest things.


Visual Basic -- finally, just a toy.   September 26, 2002
 18 out of 20 found this review helpful

I've been a professional developer with VB6 Pro for years and found it to be a widely useful product. People accused it of being a "toy language" but with a little ingenuity and a few Windows API calls you can do nearly anything a C/C++ programmer can do, in a fifth the time.

But this edition of Visual Basic is a downgrade. Don't get me wrong, I like the changes Microsoft has made to the language, but the VB.NET Standard package is a hamstrung dog. You can't use it to create DLLs or custom controls, so modularized code goes out the window. They only give you part of the web package, so all the claims about web development are just a lure.

The most irritating thing is that if you buy the next edition up you're paying for C# as well, even though the two languages are using the same libraries and the same runtime and are completely functionally equivalent. I like the design choice, but the no one needs both languages, so why isn't there a Visual Basic.NET Professional edition?

Par for course, Microsoft is stacking redundant features in one box to raise the price. It's just that in this case, the programming language itself has become a mere feature.


What you see is not what's in the box   September 18, 2002
 8 out of 10 found this review helpful

The Standard edition does not have an upgrade wizard, the error lookup, nor any built in report tools. I am running an IBM T20 with 128 RAM and being in the IDE for more than an hour slows my machine to a fustrating crawl. It takes on average 37 seconds to switch from code view to object view. I then have to restart the application to get an improvement.

All the features advertised seem to relate to Visual Studio .NET Professional and above, so this product has been a complete decoy. Do waste your money.


People this is the Standard edition   August 10, 2002
 22 out of 30 found this review helpful

...Microsoft Visual Basic Standard edition has always been a crippled version of the Pro version. The compilers and .NET Framework on top of which all versions of VB.NET and VS.NET sit is completely free to download! On top of that Microsoft has made available a free IDE for ASP.NET development called WebMatrix.

If you are looking for a VB.NET counterpart to VB6 Standard edition then, this product fits the bill perfectly.

Now regarding the VB.NET language and the Framework, anyone who claims this is "as slow is Java" is running on outdated hardware or doesn't have enough memory for the VM. If you have a Pentium 3 based system with 256-MEG or greater, you're .NET apps will run so close to native code speed it will be near impossible to tell they are "managed", if you were to code the same functionality in Java2 and run it on the same hardware spec it would still run about half the speed of the .NET code.

The managed framework is largely based around Java2, but it has many improvements over J2EE, most notable is transparent support for WebServices and ASP.NET (which I have discovered is a beautiful thing).

Start here or start elsewhere, if you are currently using Visual Studio 6, you need to move on up. Give VB.NET one month and you'll never look back.