While the syntax and style of Visual Basic .NET is very similar to earlier versions of Visual Basic this version has many important improvements, which will ensure that Visual Basic remains as Microsoft's most popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for application development.

Whether you want to develop applications for Windows or for the World Wide Web (WWW) Visual Basic .NET is an excellent tool for producing reliable, professional applications fast.

Visual Basic has set the standard as one of the best development environments for Windows applications, but increasingly we want to create applications for the WWW which will run within a browser environment.

This version of Visual Basic provides an excellent set of tools for doing this.

The WWW is a part of the Internet and originally Web pages were written in simple HTML and were static, that is you could look at them and follow links to other pages but you could not do anything else.

To develop a Web application which can respond to user requests, for example, reading a database, and updating the Web page, other tools apart from HTML are needed.

Visual Basic .NET uses an extended version of ASP called ASP.NET for doing this.