Programming Windows: Windows Forms (Premium)

Approximately 6,000 developers streamed into the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida in mid-July 2000 to hear a more concrete version of Microsoft’s vision for .NET.

They weren’t disappointed: Microsoft added substance to the vapor of the original June .NET announcement. It announced the .NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET, the C# programming language, a .NET-based successor to Active Server Pages called ASP+. They also learned that Microsoft would finally, and belatedly, consolidate its MS-DOS- and NT-based versions of Windows in a late 2001 product that was codenamed Whistler that would be the first to include bundled .NET technologies.

But the developers who attended this show came away with another prize: a set of CDs containing a very early version of Visual Studio.NET that Microsoft declined to make available to non-attendees. And so it would be another four months, in mid-November 2000, before most developers saw what Microsoft was doing to evolve its developer tools for the .NET era. And even then, the company was curiously quiet about the major and disruptive changes it was making to one of its most beloved tools ever, Visual Basic.

A bit of background.

As you may recall, Microsoft had long sought to combine the ease of use of the Visual Basic forms designer, which even beginners could use to create decent-looking Windows applications, with the sophistication of C++ or another modern object-oriented language. It briefly achieved that goal with the Java-based Windows Foundation Classes (WFC), but after a Sun Microsystems lawsuit scuttled those plans, Microsoft went back to the drawing board and created .NET. In many ways, .NET was based on Java, with some key enhancements. And one of those enhancements was that it was language agnostic. Any .NET language, in theory, would offer the same capabilities as any other .NET language.

Separately from that work, Microsoft had also been evolving its Visual Studio integrated developer environment (IDE) in the late 1990s and very early 2000s, first by offering all of its disparate programming tools in a single environment. But it had long wanted to create a Visual Basic-like visual forms designer that would work across multiple languages too. And with Visual Studio.NET, that was finally happening. Visual Basic.NET and C# could be used interchangeably, accessing the same .NET Framework libraries and the same visual forms designer to create Windows desktop applications.

The problem, for most Visual Basic fans of the day, was that Visual Basic.NET was not Visual Basic. Sure, it shared some of the same idiosyncrasies as what we’ll now call classic VB, but it more closely emulated C#, the sophisticated C++/Java-like language created by Anders Hejlsberg. And because the language and class libraries it used were object-oriented and not just object-based like classic VB, Visual Basic.NET was unsuitable for the amateurs and enthusiasts who had embraced its prede...