As a Visual Basic 2010 developer, you need to understand the concepts and technology that empower your applications: the Microsoft .NET Framework. The .NET Framework (also simply known as .NET) is the technology that provides the infrastructure for building the next generation’s applications that you will create.
If you upgrade to Visual Basic 2010 from Visual Basic 2008, the main difference that
you notice is that .NET 4.0 is a standalone infrastructure. You may remember that .NET
Framework 3.5 was instead an incremental framework that needed the prior installation
of .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0. For example, LINQ was part of .NET 3.5 whereas WPF was
part of .NET 3.0 and Windows Forms was part of .NET 2.0. With .NET 4.0 this incremental structure disappears, and all the
frameworks, BCL, and tools are part of the new version.