Language Changes for Visual Basic 6.0 Users

While earlier versions of Visual Basic are targeted for Microsoft Windows client applications, the versions beginning with Visual Basic .NET 2002 are intended for creating XML Web service applications as well. For this purpose, Visual Basic generates managed code for the common language runtime. This entails changes to the language itself.

The changes in Visual Basic are intended to:

• Simplify the language and make it more consistent.

• Add new features requested by users.

• Make code easy to read and maintain.

• Help programmers avoid introducing coding errors.

• Make applications more robust and easier to debug.

The following topics describe language changes from previous versions of Visual Basic. For a discussion of features that are new to the Visual Basic language, see What's New in the Visual Basic Language.

In This Section

• Programming Element Support Changes Summary
  Provides an alphabetical list of programming elements that have changed or are no longer supported in Visual Basic, and includes their replacements.

• Arrays for Visual Basic 6.0 Users
  Provides links to topics covering changes to array bounds, size declarations, and the ReDim Statement (Visual Basic).

• Data Types for Visual Basic 6.0 Users
  Provides links to topics covering changes to data type declaration, usage, and conversion, including the Integer Data Type (Visual Basic) and the universal data type.

• Declaration Changes for Visual Basic 6.0 Users
  Provides links to topics covering changes to declaration syntax, string length, structures, and the scope of variables inside blocks.

• Function Changes for Visual Basic 6.0 Users
  Provides links to topics covering changes to the Format Function, functions related to dates and times, and functions that include the String Data Type (Visual Basic) ($) suffix.

• Miscellaneous Language Changes for Visual Basic 6.0 Users
  Provides links to topics covering changes to operators and file handling.

• Procedure Changes for Visual Basic 6.0 Users
  Provides links to topics covering changes to parameter passing, procedure calling sequences, and procedure declarations.

• Property Changes for Visual Basic 6.0 Users
  Provides links to topics covering changes to default properties, property procedures, and property arguments.

• Control Flow Changes for Visual Basic 6.0 Users
  Provides links to topics covering changes to execution flow, and new support for structured exception handling.

• Object-Oriented Programming for Visual Basic 6.0 Users
  Provides links to topics covering changes to object creation, binary compatibility, and interfaces and classes.

Related Sections

• What's New in the Visual Basic Language
  Includes information on loop continuation, guaranteed resource disposal, mixed access properties, unsigned data types, operator overloading, generic types, and Common Language Specification (CLS) compliance.

• Help for Visual Basic 6.0 Users
  Covers changes to Visual Basic that include, among others, Web functionality, projects, forms, constants, the Circle, Line, and Pset methods, and the integrated development environment (IDE).

• Visual Basic Reference
  Provides a complete reference for the Visual Basic language and its run-time elements.