In part two of this book excerpt series on the .NET Framework
Class Library from O'Reilly's VB.NET Core Classes in a Nutshell,
get an introduction to the .NET Framework Class Library (FCL).
The .NET Framework includes the .NET Framework Class Library
(FCL), a vast collection of thousands of types (that is, of
classes, interfaces, structures, delegates, and enumerations)
that aim at encapsulating the functionality of core system and
application services in order to make application programming
easier and faster. There are classes that you can use to
manipulate the file system, access databases, serialize objects,
and launch and synchronize multiple threads of execution, to
name just a few. To make working with these classes easy,
classes with similar functionality are grouped together in
namespaces. Therefore, there is a namespace containing types for
drawing, a number of namespaces for .NET remoting, etc. In fact,
the "intrinsic" functions of the Visual Basic language (such as
InStr, Len, and UBound) are impl