Difference Between Visual Basic and Visual Basic.Net (VB6 and VB.net)

Visual Basic vs Visual Basic.Net (VB6 vs VB.net)
 

VB aka Visual Basic is a programming language that was released around 1991 as a product by Microsoft. It is a third generation event driven programing language, which supports Rapid Application Development (aka RAD). Visual Basic 6, or VB6, was released in 1998, and it is the stable release of VB.VB6 provides an IDE for the software development and user interface design. The language is based on a programming model called, Component Object Model. VB6 is a simple programming language, which not only helps beginners to learn the programming concepts quickly, but also to use it easily in large software applications. VB6 is a procedural programming language. Programmers are able to design a GUI for an application and apply functionalities directly to the controls that are added to the GUI. For an example, if there is a button in the GUI, the programmer has to write the functionality for that button within the button click event (and therefore the term event driven programming).

VB.net

VB.net is also a Microsoft product that was released in 2008. It is the successor of VB6. The main difference between VB6 and VB.net is the concept of ‘Object Oriented Programming’ introduced in VB.net. Each and every component that interacts with such a system is considered as an object. The objects are created through corresponding classes. Classes can be declared by the programmer or the language also consists of various class libraries of its own. Those are the building blocks of the VB.net language. An application program written in VB.net language runs on Microsoft’s .NET framework. The programmer or the developer should write the classes other than the built in classes, to perform whatever the system requirement. After the VB.net 2005 first major release, now it has released 2010, which supports .NET framework 4.0.

Visual Basic (VB6)

Unlike in VB6, VB.net supports shared development. For anyone who has written programs using VB6 it should be easy to adapt to VB.net programming. In addition, the programs that were written in VB6 can be converted to .net version easily by using the VB.net language migration tool. Recently the usage of VB.net for web development is also increased as a result of its support for web application development.