Setting Up Your Environment
Prerequisites: Installing Visual Basic
Editor
- Visual Studio (Windows) — the best experience for Visual Basic: IntelliSense, the Windows Forms designer, a debugger, and refactoring. The free Community edition is enough.
- Visual Studio Code — works for console apps with the C# Dev Kit extension's .NET tooling, but Visual Basic support there is basic.
- JetBrains Rider — supports Visual Basic projects too.
Create a project
dotnet new console -lang VB -o HelloVB
cd HelloVB
dotnet run
This creates HelloVB.vbproj (the project file) and Program.vb, and
dotnet run compiles and runs it:
Hello World!
Turn on Option Strict
Visual Basic has three compiler options that you should know from day one:
| Option | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
Option Explicit |
On | every variable must be declared with Dim |
Option Infer |
On | Dim x = 5 infers the type (Integer) |
Option Strict |
Off | when On, forbids risky implicit conversions and late binding |
With Option Strict Off, VB silently converts between types — even
"abc" to a number, which fails only when the program runs. Turn it
on for every project by adding one line to the .vbproj:
<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
<PropertyGroup>
<OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
<RootNamespace>HelloVB</RootNamespace>
<TargetFramework>net10.0</TargetFramework>
<OptionStrict>On</OptionStrict>
</PropertyGroup>
</Project>
All examples in this course are compiled with Option Strict On. (You
can also put Option Strict On as the first line of a single file.)
Imports you get for free
A VB project automatically imports common namespaces — System,
System.Collections.Generic, System.Linq, System.Threading.Tasks,
and a few more — so you can write Console and List(Of T) without an
Imports line.