Appendix F. What's New and Different in Visual Basic 2005

The 2005 release of Visual Basic includes major enhancements over the previous 2003 edition. Its internal version number is 8.0, and it matches a related major update of the .NET Framework, now at Version 2.0. Microsoft also removed the ".NET" term from the name of each product in the Visual Studio family. Visual Basic .NET is now known officially as Visual Basic.

This release includes many usability enhancements, many of which are realized only when using the Visual Studio 2005 product. For instance, Visual Basic now includes Edit and Continue, a feature available in all pre-.NET versions of Visual Basic, which allows source code to be modified in an actively running program. The changes are immediately reflected in the running code. A parallel change, design-time expression evaluation, processes individual source-code statements without the need to fully build an application (although Visual Studio actually builds a mini-application in the background to evaluate the expression).