I'm not going to lie to you - it is a big difference. It's a big change, and it will be hard to get used to it - at first.

Over time, you will see how much better VB.NET. I refuse to work in VB6 now - it's crap compared to VB.NET.

Things to love about Visual Studio .NET's Development Environment:
-The same intellisene that we love :-)
-Auto code formatting -> something I love... I hate taking care of tabbing and stuff
-Statement Completion -> If you type "If 4 > 3 then", when you hit enter, it will automatticly put in the "End If"
-Manage SQL Servers

Why to go to .NET:
-Power, Power, Power!
-In the long run, easier development (once you are good at .NET)
-Build once, run optimized on any version of Windows
-Huge community for support
-XML Web Services (this is a whole other post in itself... but its really really cool stuff)

One change that comes up to my head right away is the .caption (or .label, I can't even remember) property from many objects are gone. It's now all standardized on .text (like TextBox1.text = "Mike", Label1.text="John"). This change, although small, shows why .NET is better then VB6 - its all standardized. No guessing :-).

Do a search on +VB6 +VB.NET +migrating you'll get some good sources :-).

One last thing - you now can do ASP.NET straight from VB.NETs IDE. It's really easy, and has gotten me into lots of web application programming projects (including my website - yes, the whole thing is written in VB.NET).

In VB6 it was txtStuff.text and lblLabel.caption 8)

Wait, so would this type of code work? It's just an event procedure that makes a label visible and not visible, along with changes the text in a textbox.

-------------
Private Sub cmdShow_Click()
lblInfo.Visible = True
txtMessage.Text = "You Clicked it"
End Sub
-------------

Or would everything have to be changed to ".Text" ? In my opinion that doesn't make sense.

Well, yes, but no.

In VB6, a click sub would need to be named with the buttoname_Click(). In .NET, that type of thing is gone. You can name the sub anything you want - it just needs to have a "handles" statement. So it could be, Private Sub mikeiscool() handles cmdShow.Click() -although most of the time it will still use that naming convention (with the handles keyword following it).

The visible property is still there, and txtMessage.Text = whatever will work too.

One last thing, its not a "Command" button anymore - its just refered to as a Button (or btn).

I don't really get it. Wouldn't that just be more typing and make it harder?

Actually it makes a lot more sense. If you wanna check out Visual Studio 2003 (and Visual Basic .NET), Microsoft offers free online sessions into a computer running Visual Studio 2003.

Here is a link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/tryit/

I haven't found one change from VB6 to .NET to be bad. They take getting used to - but they are all there for a very good reason.

IMHO Tekmaven is right. The changes do take some getting use to, and yes the IDE is a little fancier and slicker than VB6, but in the end you will find most of your tools right where you would expect them.

It has long been the bane of VB programmers as VB not being completely Object Oriented, and since the code in both VB and C++ are compiled to essentially the same result, .NET bridges the gap by saying hey...be your favorite language and code it to get the result. Should you want to change languages, it is easy enough now to migrate over since VB.NET, C++.NET and C#.NET are all truly Object Oriented.

Being a VBA/VB6 dabbler, I have found that I can now do things in VB.NET that I found hard or some what difficult, in VB6, to being relatively easy to grasp & do.

That make sense?



Hope that helps...

P.S. Happy 4th of July all you Americans. I just returned from the Western US and enjoyed the entire drive immensely!

If you don't want to purchase Visual Studio.NET right now, you could always try SharpDevelop a free .NET IDE written in C# - you get the source too :-).

You don't need Visual Studio to compile .NET apps - you could even use Notepad to write it and the command line to compile. Microsoft provides the compilers free - just download the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK (the 110mb Framework download).

Thank you all for the adequate answers, I'm sure I'll look into getting it sometime soon. Maybe not Visual Studio, just VB .NET.

One more thing, if I previously installed Visual Studio 6, can I still keep that installed AND Visual Studio .NET? Or will they interfere... :cry: