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In this movie I'll provide an introduction to Visual Basic 2005. The objectives of this lesson will be to discuss the Visual program design and development tools, the graphical user interface elements of the Visual Studio environment, the fact that Visual Basic is considered an object-oriented programming language and what that really means for us and some basic terminology such as classes, objects, properties, methods and events. Visual Basic is considered an object-oriented programming language. There are other styles of programming languages such as procedural and event-driven. Procedural languages are the older, more traditional style of programming languages such as COBAL, RPG and in fact the original Basic. Earlier versions of Visual Basic, that is 6.0 and earlier, are considered event-driven languages. This class of languages has some elements of object orientation, but not all. Visual Basic .NET or Visual Basic 2005 is considered an object-oriented programming language. Some terminology that we need to become comfortable with: you will hear the term object often. Objects have properties, methods and events. Each object is based on a class. You may think of a class as a blueprint which all objects are based upon. Some examples of objects are forms and controls. Forms are actually windows within the Visual Basic environment. You will create windows or forms within the VB environment and you will place controls inside of the form and these controls become the points of interaction for your user in your application. Properties are characteristics of these controls, such as the name property. Each object has a name by default. But we will come to learn that it's a good idea for programmers to provide their own more meaningful names for the various controls. Another example of a property is the text property. For example, with a label, there is a text property. What the user sees as the contents of that label is the text property. Oftentimes these two properties, name and text, are confused. We will come to learn the difference between these two and why that is important. Methods of objects perform some action. Two examples of a method are open and close. We will discuss methods in more detail later. And finally, an event. The most common event is when the user clicks a mouse. When the user clicks the mouse button, you can then write code that will react to that event of the user clicking the mouse. Another example of an event is when the user selects an item from a list. Let's discuss classes a bit more. As we've already said, classes are like blueprints or templates which are used to create objects. Classes contain the definition of all available properties, methods and events for that specific object. Each new object created is based on a class. So for example, creating three new labels makes each label an instance of the label class; that is each of those labels will have certain characteristics, properties, methods and events that are consistent with all objects in that class. It may be helpful to consider the following analogy when thinking about these terms. We can think of a car as belonging to the car class. The make, model and color of the car could be though of as properties of the car class. Each car is an object of the car class. This is referred to as an instance of the car class. When the car starts, stops or turns, these may be thought of as methods belonging to the car class. These are actions. An event might be thought of as when the car pulls into a gas station. As has already been mentioned, Visual Basic is one of several programming languages that are included in the Visual Studio environment. Other languages include Visual C++, Visual C# and Visual J#. All of these languages are based on the .NET 2.0 Framework. The .NET 2.0 Framework creates a common platform for development of Windows-based applications.