Some general Questions about vb.net

[master_mtz]

hi all ...

i am a new vb.net user ...

i downloaded the visual basic 2005 express edition and i have some questions about it :

1- Is this version the known vb.net development environment?

2-What is the differences between the express and professional or enterprise edition ?

3- Isn't the .net framework .. a memory eater ... i mean .. in general all vb.net applications i tested are slow .. they eat a lot of memory .. todau i made a really silly Countdown clock .. and ran it .. i was shocked to know that it is the most memory consuming process ... it takes 30 Mb of RAM !!!!!!!!!!! while the whole application is just not more than 100 kb .. is JIT Compiling really a system resources eater ????? or did i make something wrong ?

4- What kind of applications is vb.net supposed to develop .. can i make games and Office software using it ? or is it just for Wb-Development ??

5- Do I have to make the users of my applications install the .net framework to start my .net applications ? is n't this something horrible ????

[LLXX]

hi all ...

i am a new vb.net user ...

i downloaded the visual basic 2005 express edition and i have some questions about it :

1- Is this version the known vb.net development environment?

2-What is the differences between the express and professional or enterprise edition ?

3- Isn't the .net framework .. a memory eater ... i mean .. in general all vb.net applications i tested are slow .. they eat a lot of memory .. todau i made a really silly Countdown clock .. and ran it .. i was shocked to know that it is the most memory consuming process ... it takes 30 Mb of RAM !!!!!!!!!!! while the whole application is just not more than 100 kb .. is JIT Compiling really a system resources eater ????? or did i make something wrong ?

4- What kind of applications is vb.net supposed to develop .. can i make games and Office software using it ? or is it just for Wb-Development ??

5- Do I have to make the users of my applications install the .net framework to start my .net applications ? is n't this something horrible ????

1. It is a development environment, yes.

2. Express has less features than professional/enterprise version.

3. Indeed it is. This is because a JIT compiler must be optimised to compile code fast, and not compile fast code. (IMHO it fails in both aspects)

4. Any application, providing you have the time to write it (and the CPU and memory to run it...)

5. Yes, if they don't already have it. Depends what you think of a few hundred megabytes of highly inefficient code.

[master_mtz]

...thanks for ur reply ... but .... it 's disappointing ...

Do u recomend me to go on vb.net ??? or find something else to learn ?!!

[RogueSpear]

If you have any background in basic at all, or even VBscript, then picking up on VB2005 is pretty easy. The learning curve at first can be a little daunting, but once you "get it" everything falls into place. I started using Visual Basic with the idea of porting over a VBscript I had made, AutoRIS, into a full application, AutoImage. It took me literally only a few weeks to do it.

I've found that almost anything at all that depends on .NET is going to be an absolute pig when it comes to RAM. My program continuously reports at 30MB in Task Manager. There's just no reason for that. But it's easy and I can make changes without too much problem. One of the advantages to programming with "managed code", as VB.NET and C# are, is that you don't have to concern yourself with garbage collection, screwing around with memory, etc. Plus you get a ton of functionality in .NET that you would otherwise have to construct from scratch (unless you were to purchase custom libraries).

Java shares these same benefits, but again you need the runtime environment and Java apps tend to be slow and cumbersome. If you want fast, small, tight code, etc. you're going to want to look into C/C++. If you want to make a command line utility, say to use during windows setup before .NET is installed, then VB is pretty much out of the question.

[LLXX]

...thanks for ur reply ... but .... it 's disappointing ...

Do u recomend me to go on vb.net ??? or find something else to learn ?!!

The general state of today's software is indeed disappointing.

Go with C/C++. Both highly regarded as true programming languages, well-established and pretty much standard.

[master_mtz]

thx roguespear for your detailed reply .. i am happy to know that suchj a program was made using vb.net ..(ported or whatever) .. today i tested my application on vista rc1 .. it worked with 4 mb of memory instead of 30 .. , and moreover .. the .net framework is already integrated with vista .. this is something promising ..

@LLXX

well .. c/c++ ??? but i think it is a bit difficult to learn isn't it ?? i will start with vb.net ...and later will learn c++... is that ok ?? currently i have little knowledge of both ... but i found using vb.net is more productive .. and demands less efforts

[Colonel]

As a general reply about .Net memory usage and performance, a bare bone executable app appears to take up ~30 MBs of memory because it it being hosted by the common language runtime (CLR). The CLR is active any time any .Net application is running, but because of the way it works, windows counts it's memory for ALL .Net processes. So if you were to run two "base bone" .net apps, they would both APPEAR to use ~30 MBs of memory, when in fact they are using only ~30 combined, zero if another .Net app is running some where else.

You can read this example of how this affects even basic code.

JIT is a good idea, because it compiles your code on the end user's machine, with specific optimizations for their hardware. It only compiles any given method once, the first time it is accessed. If you want to avoid this, as part of your install, you can use the NGen tool to pre-compile your assemblies so they are NOT JIT'ed.

Requiring users to install the.Net framework is not a big deal at all. XP SP2 shipped with .Net 1.1, and 2.0 is now included in automatic updates, so there is a good chance they already have it. Vista is even shipping with .Net 3.0 pre-installed.

In regards to LLXX's post, .Net is considered a true, standard language and is now what is being taught in computer science programs at many respected universities. C/C++ are almost considered obsolete these days, at least in applications that do not require granular memory control or portability to other platforms.