code 39 vb.net Development Tools in VB.NET

Encoding Code 128A in VB.NET Development Tools

A computing platform is of little use without the tools and languages necessary to develop applications for it. .NET provides a larger, more sophisticated set of development tools than the standard Java software development kit. The J2SDK provides the minimal set of tools that

are required to compile and run Java applications, which leaves the development of more advanced tools to third parties. Microsoft, on the other hand, with a long history in the development tool market and a large established developer community, has updated and expanded its existing range of tools and languages to support the .NET environment.

The J2SDK ships with a set of command-line tools necessary to compile and run Java applications; the same is true of the .NET SDK. Both are freely available and can be used to develop commercial applications for their respective platforms.

Many programmers prefer to work with a graphical integrated development environment (IDE) instead of the command-line tools. A good IDE can dramatically increase the productivity of a developer and make development a more pleasant experience, especially when designing user interfaces. There is no standard IDE for the Java platform. Many third-party organizations offer both free and commercial IDEs; the quality and utility of these products vary greatly. As part of .NET, Microsoft has released Visual Studio .NET, the latest version of the popular Visual Studio development environment. Visual Studio .NET is a common development platform for all .NET technologies, comes with support for developing applications in all Microsoft .NET languages, and offers all the features expected of a modern IDE. The strength of Visual Studio .NET lies in its deep integration with the .NET platform, offering development time integration with some of the .NET servers such as Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Internet Information Services.

Multilanguage support and integration is a fundamental design goal of the CLR and is critical to promoting adoption of the .NET platform from all areas of the development community. The strength of the .NET language support is that components produced in one language can be consumed by another; for example, a managed C++ application can make use of a C# library. The requirement is that components must conform to the CLS; it is possible to develop components with one .NET language that cannot be consumed by another. Consult Appendix E for more information about complying with the CLS. Microsoft currently provides three languages as part of .NET: Visual Basic .NET, Microsoft Visual C++ .NET, and Microsoft Visual C# .NET. In addition, Microsoft Visual J# .NET is currently in beta.

Unlike the other .NET languages, C# has been designed from the ground up to support the .NET Framework. The design of a programming language is shaped by the success and failure of earlier designs. The Java language includes many elements from C and C++ but excludes many more that were considered unsafe or difficult to use.

The designers of the C# language and the .NET Framework have clearly been influenced by Java, C, and C++ but have taken a fundamentally different approach to resolving conflicts in safe design. A great deal of effort has been made to ensure that the developer can easily write safe and robust code, but features that are considered to be dangerous are still available to the advanced or legacy programmer who can explicitly indicate the need to step outside the limitations of safe code. Although the .NET platform has only recently been released, comparisons between Java and C# are natural because of the many similarities. Generally, these comparisons tend to focus solely on the obvious structural and syntactic similarities, whereas a deeper exploration reveals fundamental differences and a wealth of new features available to the C# programmer. Fortunately, the strong influence of the Java language allows experienced Java programmers to learn the basic C# language quickly, and with less difficulty than a C/C++ programmer. However, some C# features are derived from elements of C or C++ that were excluded from Java and that may be difficult to appreciate from a pure Java perspective.