Program Structure and Code Conventions (Visual Basic)

Visual Studio 2012

This section introduces the typical Visual Basic program structure, provides a simple Visual Basic program, "Hello, World", and discusses Visual Basic code conventions. Code conventions are suggestions that focus not on a program's logic but on its physical structure and appearance. Following them makes your code easier to read, understand, and maintain. Code conventions can include, among others:

Standardized formats for labeling and commenting code.
Guidelines for spacing, formatting, and indenting code.
Naming conventions for objects, variables, and procedures.

The following topics present a set of programming guidelines for Visual Basic programs, along with examples of good usage.

In This Section

Structure of a Visual Basic Program: Provides an overview of the elements that make up a Visual Basic program.
Visual Basic Version of Hello, World: Provides a step-by-step recreation of the classic program "Hello World," redone in Visual Basic.
Main Procedure in Visual Basic: Discusses the procedure that serves as the starting point and overall control for your application.
References and the Imports Statement (Visual Basic): Discusses how to reference objects in other assemblies.
Namespaces in Visual Basic: Describes how namespaces organize objects within assemblies.
Visual Basic Naming Conventions: Includes general guidelines for naming procedures, constants, variables, arguments, and objects.
Visual Basic Coding Conventions: Reviews the guidelines used in developing the samples in this documentation.
Conditional Compilation in Visual Basic: Describes how to compile particular blocks of code selectively while directing the compiler to ignore others.
How to: Break and Combine Statements in Code (Visual Basic): Shows how to divide long statements into multiple lines and combine short statements on one line.
How to: Collapse and Hide Sections of Code (Visual Basic): Shows how to collapse and hide sections of code in the Visual Basic code editor.
How to: Label Statements (Visual Basic): Shows how to mark a line of code to identify it for use with statements such as On Error Goto.
Special Characters in Code (Visual Basic): Shows how and where to use non-numeric and non-alphabetic characters.
Comments in Code (Visual Basic): Discusses how to add descriptive comments to your code.
Keywords as Element Names in Code (Visual Basic): Describes how to use brackets ([]) to delimit variable names that are also Visual Basic keywords.
Me, My, MyBase, and MyClass in Visual Basic: Describes various ways to refer to elements of a Visual Basic program.
Visual Basic Limitations: Discusses the removal of known coding limits within Visual Basic.

Related Sections

Typographic and Code Conventions (Visual Basic): Provides standard coding conventions for Visual Basic.
Writing Code in the Code and Text Editor: Describes features that make it easier for you to write and manage your code.