Getting Started with VB.NET Knowledge Base Ashutosh Mukherjee ashutosh@desdevpro.com http://www.desdevpro.com 11 Aug 2009 Visual Basic VB.NET Tutorial Series Welcome to Visual Basic 2008, the most mature version yet of the most popular programming language for building Windows and web applications. I will help you build your concepts bit-by-bit in this tutorial series. Think of this as an e-Classroom. If you have any comments/questions, you can use the comments box on the right, or you can contact me through e-mail. Getting Started Launch your Visual Basic .NET Express Edition or Visual Studio software. There's a lot happening on the start page. But basically, this is where you can start a new project, or open an existing one. The first Tab, Projects, is selected. At the moment, the area labelled "Open an Existing Project" may be blank. This is what you'll see when you run the software for the first time (because you haven't created a project yet). When you create a project, the Name you gave it will be displayed on this page, as a hyperlink. Clicking the link will open the project. At the bottom of the screen, there are two buttons: "New Project" and "Open Project". To get started, click the "New Project" button. When you do, you'll see this dialogue box appear: img1.jpg As a beginner, you'll normally want the option selected: "Windows Application", in the "Visual Basic Projects" folder. This means that you're going to design an application for Microsoft Windows operating system. If you look at the name of your project, you'll see it says "WindowsApplication1". This is the default name for your projects. It's not a good idea to keep this name. After all, you don't want all of your projects to be called "WindowsApplication1", "WindowsApplication2", etc. So change this Name to the following: My First Project Keep the Location the same as the default. This is a folder inside of your "My Documents" folder called "Visual Studio Projects". A new folder will then be created for you, and its name will be the name of your project. All of your files related to your first project are then saved in this folder. Click the OK button, and the Visual Basic NET design time environment will open. It will look like the following : img2.jpg Conclusion That's a very daunting piece of software, hey? Well, don't worry. We'll break it down bit by bit in the next few sections, and pretty soon you'll be zipping your way around it like a pro!