You can use Visual Basic for two basic purposes: constructing ASP.NET websites or building Windows forms applications. Either way you're going to have to learn how to write code, and we teach you this using Visual Studio as our development environment.

Visual C# (sometimes called C Sharp) is one of two main languages that you can use to develop in for the .NET framework (the other being VB). It's an unscientific survey, but we reckon about three-quarters of all .NET code examples on the web use C #, even though it can be slightly harder to programme in than VB.

ASP.NET is the Microsoft alternative to PHP.  You can use it to get your website to render different pages to a web browser depending on what a user chooses.  For example, when a user clicks on a photo of a product, an ASP.NET page could:

• look up the details for this product in your corporate database;
• compile a page containing its specification; and
• return this page to the browser in the correct format (regardless of whether they might be using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome or whatever)

Writing systems using ASP.NET within Visual Studio (with SQL Server as a back-end database) is our preferred development environment.  Let us share our enthusiasm with you!

Microsoft would have you do all of your programming and development within Visual Studio, and so would Wise Owl!  Learn how to create ASP.NET websites, WinForms applications in Visual Basic or WinForms applications in Visual C#, VSTO or Visual Studio Tools for Office systems and SQL Server Reporting Services reports - all from within Visual Studio!