Welcome to the new version of Visual Basic for 2005. As its name implies, Visual Basic is a visual way to create new programs for the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems. And though it is basic in many ways, the Visual Basic language is also very powerful. You can create new class libraries and XML Web services, as well as programs that you can use on your PC or your Web browser, or even your phone or PDA. Anything that can be done in Windows can be done in Visual Basic. Programming in Visual Basic is easier than you might think, thanks to the visual tools supplied by Visual Studio. You don’t have to type line after line of code to create a working program — Visual Studio automatically generates some code for you when you drag and drop components with the visual tools. Of course, being able to read and write code is important too, and this book provides plenty of code samples so you can understand the inner workings of your programs.