what is the difference between visual basic and vb.net?

Visual Basic (VB) is an event driven programming language and associated development environment from Microsoft. VB has been replaced by Visual Basic .NET The older version of VB was derived heavily from BASIC and enables rapid application development (RAD) of graphical user interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using DAO, RDO, or ADO, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects. Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) is an object-oriented computer language that can be viewed as an evolution of Microsoft's Visual Basic (VB) implemented on the Microsoft .NET framework. Its introduction has been controversial, as significant changes were made that broke backward compatibility with VB and caused a rift within the developer community. see more details here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_basic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic_.NET