Free Visual Basic.NET Standard Edition
 

I'm probably the only dork more excited for the free training movies than the free software...

...and the movies didn't work for me anyways.

DD, what problems did you have with the videos? I was able to get them to work, but had to go back to IE and tweak media player some as well.

This is awesome.

I was planning on purchasing VB.net in the next few wekks so I will now save about $100. Muchas gracias.

Also, these instructional videos are pretty good.

Draft Dodger, I couldn't get them to work at first either. I upgraded to Windows Media Player 9 and then changed the settings just the way they suggested on the website. The movies now work like a champ.

Thanks again sjshaw.

i bought bought this less than 2 months ago :-(

Is this just Visual Basic?

Yes. VB.net 2003 to be exact.

Glad for the link. Thanks a lot. I loved the training videos.. That I love a lot!

Man, I'd have killed for a NFR copy of Visual Studio .net but I'll be content with a free copy of VB.net. KU's bookstores don't even stock a student edition of Visual Studio and there's no way I'm paying hundreds of bucks that I just can't afford.

SI

I have also read that Job Lot (with stores in CT, MA, and RI) is selling the standard editions of VB .NET and C# with CDs and manuals for $15. It doesn't help me living in NC, but hopefully it will help someone here...

What is the difference between .NET and a non . NET?

short answer: .NET is newer and is a confusing series name instead of "version x". (kind of like Office XP instead of Office 2002).

progression goes something like

Version 5
Version 6
.NET
.NET 2003

Just got mine in the mail :)

Sweet. That means mine will be here soon.

For the computer illiterate, such as myself, the name is confusing. I assumed that a program with a name including '.NET', was probably a program designed specifically for internet use. Oh well, I guess I'm too far behind to ever catch up.

it is a stupid name (although I'm not sure how many computer illeterates are purchasing programming tools)

the original name for TPF was Football.NET - thank god they changed it

With VB, the difference is that:

• The new version will produce only managed code that runs against the .NET framework (which I believe is quite a bit more to download than a typical set of VB6 runtimes)
• The new version has substantial incompatibilities with previous versions and (in the opinion of some people) is different enough that it should be considered a new language -- some people call it Visual Fred to make that point. Some of the changes make sense, others are gratuitous and appear to be imposed by C or Java language snobs.

Dola, the .NET framework is certainly many more things than simply an internet pack, but since many aspects of it were designed to compete with Java (which has most of its buzz from internet applets), it's not a wholly inaccurate name.

I forgot to mention I got mine yesterday in the mail.

My wife just called and made my day. Mine came in the mail today.

(sigh) - I'm such a geek.

Ooh. I'm heading out to my mailbox at 4ish when our mailman comes. I'm excited, too.

<-- also a computer nerd.

SI

Woo! Got mine today. Time to "hello world" ;)

SI

I wouldn't say the .NET name is stupid at all. The biggest improvements IMO were for building web apps and web services. You can use it for non network apps, but it really was designed with internet applications in mind.

For those of you who didn't get in on the VB.NET deal, you can download the .NET SD from the MS Site for free, and then use SharpDevelop, which is a pretty nifty open-source IDE (www.icsharpcode.net, I think).

I've been tooling around with using C# for the past few days, and I have to say, it's pretty darn nice.

I got mine yesterday. :)

I have not done much but install it, because too many things keep distracting me.

Could you provide a link for the VB.NET SD free download? Or a URL with the specific MS page as the target? I hate navigating the labyrinthian MS Web site. It's just incredibly hard to track stuff down there.

CR

Don't give in to the dark side.

I just got mine yesterday. The first program is "Lucky Sevens" and it was a great moment to get it completed. Okay, it was simple, but I was very happy, I already know how to come up with Random Numbers....haha....and my first experiment on my own was rolling 3 6-sided dice and getting 3-18. So far it's rolling a 0-5 instead of 1-6, but I think I know an easy fix (+1) Also, I vaguely remember the formatting of the Basic language, but what happened to the 10, 20, 30, 40 command line structure!!! j/k.

But anyway, it comes with MS Visual Basic .NET 2003, a CD of pre-requisites, 3 CD bundle with MSDN Library (whatever that is) and Windows 2000 SP4 (which I guess is just because I must have told them I had Win2000), and a small training book (I also picked up a book at Books-a-Million to help me out).

Hopefully, as I get better with this, the video's might actually prove helpful. (Most of it was greek at the time).

This should do it:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Or just google for .net SDK and you should come up with the link.

Issues with C#? I have to say, ever since I got out of project/product management and into database stuff, I've lost touch on the development side a bit. I've got some solid C++ experience, but I never fully grasped MFC. I had a decent little Windows app up and running in a few minutes using C#.

I know it's not groundbreaking (stealing liberally from java, VB, and C++), but it really does seem to do a nice job.

Got my free vb.net 2003 today! Time to see what 2003 does over 6. I got to go to a "MSDN event" here in houston the other day where they demo'ed Whidbey(I think thats the spelling) which will be 2005. It has some REAL NICE features.

I have VB.net, but have had a problem with it since I am using XP. Have any of you been able to use VB.net 2003 with XP?

Nevermind, found my own answer;

¹ Limited functionality. Visual Basic .NET 2003 does not support creating ASP.NET Web applications or ASP.NET XML Web services when using Windows XP Home Edition.

I think the Java/OO zealots killed it dead in VB.NET. I think it was still possible to code that way (if you really, really, insisted) in VB5/6, but could be mistaken about that.