The Microsoft.VisualBasic library is provided to ease the implementation of the VB.NET language itself. For VB.NET, it provides some methods familiar to the VB developers and can be seen as a helper library. It is a core part of the .NET redistribution and maps common VB syntax to framework equivalents, without it some of the code may seem foreign to VB programmers.
| Microsoft.VisualBasic | .NET Framework |
| CInt, CStr | Convert.ToInt(...), ToString() |
| vbCrLf | Environment.NewLine, or "\r\n" |
| MsgBox | MessageBox.Show(...) |