DevCity.NET :: Evolving to VB.NET. Part 4 - Creating YOUR Top 10 Reasons to Adopt Visual Basic .NET

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This is the fourth in a series of articles which discuss evolving to VB.NET from a previous version of Visual Basic. This article continues where Part three left off, by presenting more .NET features that MAY be of use to you. Read Part three to understand why these features are being presented.

.NET Technology	Feature	Example Benefit
ASP.NET	Use an ASP.NET web service to provide communication between a web form application and business logic components on an application server.	A new and easy way to implement communication between presentation and business logic tiers.
Microsoft .NET Application Blocks	Use the free Microsoft Data Access application block as the data access tier of a distributed application.	Save time, same money, and use best practices when implementing a data access tier.
.NET CLR	Use automatic memory allocation, otherwise known as 'garbage collection', to manage an application's memory.	Write less code and avoid memory leaks.
Microsoft .NET Compact Framework	Write applications for phones and other mobile devices.	Prewritten code and device emulators make writing applications for mobile devices simpler and faster.
Windows Forms	Use .NET Windows Forms data binding classes to bind form controls to data objects. .	Greatly expanded data binding capabilities and stability than data binding VB Classic make data binding viable in .NET.
.NET Framework	Use the .NET 'Delegate' type to create your own multicast delegate to call a series of procedures in or across objects.	For example, when a payment is received in an online shopping application, a multicast delegate can call multiple procedures in different objects to do all the payment housekeeping.
.NET Framework	Create your own value types from the .NET Framework's user-defined value type.	User defined value types are like lightweight objects with almost all the features of user defined classes. Value types are allocated in stack memory so they are very fast and memory efficient.
.NET Framework	Add sort capabilities to the classes you define by implementing the .NET Framework's IComparable interface.	Makes it easy to add sort capability to your objects to make them work with .NET Framework built in types that can contain and sort objects, types such as form controls.
ASP.NET	ASP.NET provides a new full-featured cache engine that can be used by pages to store and retrieve arbitrary objects across HTTP requests.	Output caching, fragment caching, and enhanced application data caching are just a few of the features you can use to build higher performing web applications.
.NET Framework	Listen for file system changes with the .NET Framework's FileSystemWatcher type.	Write a file archiving system that listens for file system change notifications in a directory and archives new or modified files.
ADO.NET	Automatically create and use your own strongly typed DataSet.	Get design-time IntelliSense to make coding with tables and columns easier. Take advantage of enhanced validation features in ADO.NET and form controls. Get automatic design-time type mismatch checking.
ADO.NET	Create your own lightweight database with the DataSet type.	Create a DataSet programatically or by using the XSD designer, add multiple tables, add relationships, add constraints, get built in methods for saving the database to file and loading it from file into memory - and much more.