This document describes the Visual Basic .NET language. It is designed to be a complete language description, not a conceptual overview or a user's reference manual. For a conceptual overview, see Visual Basic Language Features. For language reference information, see Visual Basic Language Reference.

In This Section

1. Introduction

Describes the evolution of Visual Basic and its role within .NET.

2. Lexical Grammar

Discusses the syntax of characters, lines, identifiers, keywords, literals, and separators.

3. Preprocessing Directives

Summarizes the role of conditional compilation, external source directives, and region directives.

4. General Concepts

Provides an overview of the core concepts of object-oriented programming in Visual Basic: declaration spaces, inheritance, implementation, polymorphism, accessibility, scope, namespace and type names, and attributes.

5. Attributes

Summarizes the syntax of attributes, which modify entities when being declared.

6. Source Files and Namespaces

Explains compilation options, the Imports statement, and namespaces.

7. Types

Provides an overview of Visual Basic .NET as a type-safe system: the taxonomy of value and reference types.

8. Conversions

Discusses the grammar of changing value types: implicit and explicit conversions, widening and narrowing conversions, value and reference conversions, and cast expressions.

9. Type Members

Discusses methods, constructors, events, constants, variables, and properties.

10. Statements

Summarizes the syntax of executable code in Visual Basic .NET.

11. Expressions

Summarizes the syntax of computational processes in Visual Basic .NET.

12. Visual Basic .NET Grammar Summary

Provides an overview of the entire Visual Basic .NET grammar.

Related Sections

Visual Basic Language and Run-Time Reference

Visual Basic Language Features