NGWS SDK Documentation  

This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.
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1.2 The purpose of Visual Basic 7.0

For nearly a decade, the Visual Basic language has been a cornerstone of the Windows platform. It is easy to underestimate the impact that Visual Basic 1.0 had on the Windows market – for the first time, writing Windows applications was a simple and relatively painless task, something graspable by a wide range of programmers. Similarly, the introduction of Visual Basic 4.0 was important for helping to establish Automation as the standard object architecture of the Windows platform.

Microsoft is in the middle of a shift, however, from providing an operating system to providing Web Services. This shift recognizes the reality that applications are beginning to migrate from a standalone executable sitting on a user's hard drive to a distributed application delivered by a Web server across the Internet. A key part of Microsoft's thrust into this new Web Services space is the NGWS Frameworks and Runtime. The NGWS Frameworks and Runtime is designed from the ground up to allow developers to easily write and deploy complex Web applications.

Visual Basic 7.0 is designed to provide the same ease of use for building applications for the NGWS Frameworks and Runtime that earlier versions of Visual Basic provided for developing on the Windows platform.