Vestiges of VB

As you probably know, Visual Basic 2010 is only the latest in a long line of versions of Visual Basic. The tenth, to be exact. (The first version of Visual Basic was released in 1991.)

The move from “classic” Visual Basic to Visual Basic .NET in 2003 was a huge change. There were changes to the language itself (they’re just similar enough to be really confusing), and with the integration of the .NET Class Library, and the changes that entailed...to say the learning curve was steep is a vast understatement. (And I speak as one who still has occasional bouts of altitude sickness.)

It was never going to be easy to upgrade (many programmers still haven’t), but Microsoft did what they could to ease the transition. Among other things, they set defaults in Visual Studio to make VB .NET behave as much as possible like earlier versions. Unfortunately, several of those default settings aren’t considered best practice for new development, so let’s take a minute to fix that up before we go any further.