Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET 2003 Kick Start

References, Namespaces, and Imports

As you move through the rest of this book, it is important that you understand this set of concepts—references, namespaces, and imports. These are relatively complex concepts, but they come up right from the beginning so they need to be covered now.

References

If you have programmed in Visual Basic 6.0, the concept of references should not be new to you; you add a reference to an external library (usually a DLL or an OCX) so that your code can use the classes contained within that library. This concept still exists in Visual Basic .NET, and you even have an Add Reference dialog box, which allows you to add references to either .NET or COM libraries. We will get into the difference between adding a reference ...