Was hoping some folks with much more experience could point me in the right direction........ Here's the situation. I have been learning, using, and developing Access applications for a while now....... I really enjoy it. But I feel it's time to take a step further into application development. The majority of all the future Apps I can see myself involved in will be based around business needs. So probably alot of databases..... But my confusion starts with Visual Basic vs VB.net......... Whats up? Which to learn? Are there other programming languages that would suite me for application development better?????

Any input would be helpful! I know we have some very good programmers on this site so how bout some opinions.....

Thanks

I would definitely make sure I am comfortable with SQL Server before going into business application development because most businesses will lean towards using this instead of Access. If the company is small enough for access, then normally access is all you need without an outside vb application as a front end.

Also, if you're looking to become a full-time programmer, the most marketable languages today are, in no particular order, probably C++, C# (part of .NET), and Java. If it's simply a choice between learning VB.Net or Visual Basic (as in Visual Basic 6.0), then learn VB.Net since it is a newer, more fully featured language and it will be around longer...

Regards,
Tim

Thanks for the input.
What exactly are the differences between VB6 and VB.net???

VB.NET is newer: don't laugh, that's significant because it means Microsoft will support vb.net for now while they will largely ignore VB 6.0 because they're still selling one and not the other. It's ugly but MS's business plans, at least for now, strongly affect the IT market and the software tools people use...

After that, there are too many differences to list -- VB.NET was a large break from Visual Basic 6.0...it includes a richer collection of techniques and objects (like reflection, arraylists, hashtables, and more) and fully supports inheritance, a standardized, object oriented approach to reuse (rather than rewrite) code. It also does things differently under the covers, from compiling code to application security to memory managment.

Regards,
Tim

Thanks again for the info

If you already know VBA from Access, then a VB variant would make sense as your next language - VB.Net would be best, as people have said.
From there it's not that much of a leap to C#.Net or Java, if you feel the need to learn either.

If you already know VBA from Access, then a VB variant would make sense as your next language - VB.Net would be best, as people have said.
From there it's not that much of a leap to C#.Net or Java, if you feel the need to learn either.http://access-programmers.co.uk/forums/images/icons/icon14.gif

Hi adeptus, if given a choice to learn either C# or Java, which would u choose.

Well, personally, I already knew Java before I learnt VB :D

Depends which would be more useful in your chosen field.

Java is used in cross-platform applications, ie where you want to be able to run it on almost any computer & operating system, and often on the web. I believe financial institutions use it a lot.

C# is functionally pretty much the same as VB.net (though I believe they are starting to be specialised away from each other?) - but some companies prefer one over the other.