Database support is one of the key features of Visual Basic.Net programming environment. Many programmers spend most of their time writing data access code, and this needs to be the most robust portion of a database application. Visual Basic.Net provides a series of data aware controls to provide a user interface. Visual Basic.Net is an innovative and visual programming language that is becoming the language of choice for programs that need to run efficiently and accurately.VB.Net, which has evolved into an extremely powerful application development tool, takes a lot of complexity out of programming for the windows environment. Visual Basic.Net includes a large number of major enhancements include the following:

Powerful Windows Based Applications
Visual Basic .NET comes with features such as a powerful new forms designer, an in-place menu editor, and automatic control anchoring and docking. Visual Basic .NET delivers new productivity features for building more robust applications easily and quickly. With an improved integrated development environment (IDE) and a significantly reduced startup time, Visual Basic .NET offers fast, automatic formatting of code as you type, improved IntelliSense, an enhanced object browser and XML designer, and much more.

Simplified deployment
With Visual Basic .NET we can build applications more rapidly and deploy and maintain them with efficiency. Visual Basic .NET 2003 and .NET Framework 1.1 makes "DLL Hell" a thing of the past. Side-by-side versioning enables multiple versions of the same component to live safely on the same machine so that applications can use a specific version of a component. XCOPY-deployment and Web auto-download of Windows-based applications combine the simplicity of Web page deployment and maintenance with the power of rich, responsive Windows-based applications.

Powerful, Flexible and Simplified Data Access
You can tackle any data access scenario easily with ADO.NET and ADO data access. The flexibility of ADO.NET enables data binding to any database, as well as classes, collections, and arrays, and provides true XML representation of data. Seamless access to ADO enables simple data access for connected data binding scenarios. Using ADO.NET, Visual Basic .NET can gain high-speed access to MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, Microsoft Access, and more.

Improved Coding
You can code faster and more effectively. A multitude of enhancements to the code editor, including enhanced IntelliSense, smart listing of code for greater readability and a background compiler for real-time notification of syntax errors transforms into a rapid application development (RAD) coding machine.

Full Object Oriented Construct
You can create reusable, enterprise-class code using full object-oriented constructs. Language features include full implementation inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism. Structured exception handling provides a global error handler and eliminates spaghetti code.

Reuse Existing Investments
You can reuse all your existing ActiveX Controls. Windows Forms in Visual Basic .NET 2003 provide a robust container for existing ActiveX controls. In addition, full support for existing ADO code and data binding enable a smooth transition to Visual Basic .NET 2003.

Upgrade Wizard
You upgrade your code to receive all of the benefits of Visual Basic .NET 2003. The Visual Basic .NET Upgrade Wizard, available in Visual Basic .NET 2003 Standard Edition, and higher, upgrades up to 95 percent of existing Visual Basic code and forms to Visual Basic .NET with new support for Web classes and User Controls.