 Hey everybody this is Brian. Today we are going to start down the path of professionalvisiobasic.net development. No I did not write this book and no I'm not even endorsing it and to be quite blunt I don't think I even own this book but I just needed something simple to show you to demonstrate that we are going to be doing VB.net. So rather than going through hours and hours of theory and practice and the real grunt work of it we're just going to focus on how to get things done because I'm a firm believer that if you're really interested in the theory and practice you're going to learn those along the way. The best way to learn something is through experience. So what is visual basic.net? Well visual basic.net is a rad language and when I say rad I don't mean it's cool although some people think it's very cool. I've been programming in VB.net since visual basic version two many many many years ago but rad rad actually stands for rapid application development and what that means is you can spend hours and hours and months and months building an application in another language like C++ and you can get those same results in minutes with visual basic or another rad language but because our tutorials on visual basic we're going to focus on that. Now this image shows you visual studio, Microsoft visual basic.net application and here's just some sample code of what it might look like. As you can see it might look a little cryptic at first but when you break it down it's very simple. It looks like a pseudo English. If something then do something. Try and try etc etc. We're going to cover all these things in due time but I just wanted to give you a little quick view of what the language actually looks like. It reads quite literally like a story. If Bob.angry equal true then Bob storms out of the room. Things like that. This is what a typical VB.net application might look like. This is a program called sharp development. We won't be covering that but here's a windows form and as you can see you literally just drag and drop components on here. That's what I mean by rad or rapid application development rather than reinventing the wheel every single application. You just reuse components. Makes life very very simple. Now the reason why I'm showing sharp develop rather than one of the Microsoft tools is .net is an open standard meaning contrary to what you might have heard. Yes it is free. Yes you can use it. No you don't have to pay a dime. To prove that point we are going to download visual basic express. What you do is you go to www.microsoft.com express and you can get free versions of all of their programs. You can get SQL server, you can get visual basic, C sharp, visual studio. Now I use the professional version of visual studio but it also costs about $4,000. So don't worry you're not going to have to pay a dime. For these tutorials we're going to be covering the express version. So go to Microsoft.com slash express. Scroll down to the bottom and you can do web, windows, phone or database. For these tutorials we are going to windows programming. That means all of our applications are going to be windows. Not web pages, not mobile phones, not database. We will cover those eventually down the road in other chapters. Just click learn more. And you can see here we are in the visual studio express and you can choose multiple languages. The .net framework and this is about as much theory as I'm going to give you. The .net framework is simply a platform that languages can use and reuse. So multiple languages run on the .net framework. Long time ago visual basic used to be extremely slow and visual C plus plus was extremely fast. Well that's not the case anymore. If they're using the .net framework they all run at the speed of the .net framework. So visual basic is just as fast as C plus plus. And there's a newer language visual C sharp which is actually my favorite language. We'll cover in later tutorials which is a language that Microsoft created specifically to work with the .net framework. It's very productive and I think you'll like it but we're going to cover visual basic .net. So click Microsoft visual basic 2010 express. It'll take you to the downloads page. Scroll down. You're going to want to select your language. Choose English or whatever language you speak. And of course if you use an IE you get that annoying you know you sure you want to download this and then you got to redo it. And then you just save the application. Save it into its own directory. And there you go. Once you have this downloaded simply run it install it follow the prompts on the screen. I promise you it's very very painless. Some of you may remember the old days of installing a C plus plus compiler and having to configure the parameters and the environment variables and you don't have to do any of that. You just point and click your way through it. I thank you for watching. I hope you found this video entertaining and educational. As always if you have questions or comments just send me a message or leave me a comment on my YouTube page. Thank you.