Visual Studio.Net is not an invention that was made overnight. Visual Studio.net is a result of extensive research and is also an extension to Visual Basic 6.0 – another award winning, popular IDE. Visual Studio 6.0 had Visual 6.0 which has one of the most popular IDE that was used for building small client server business applications. The edge that the Visual Studio.net IDE has over the other programming environments is the flexibility it provides to the programmers not familiar to the Visual Studio.net IDE i.e. it does not take much of an effort to shift to the Visual Studio.net style of programming. Programmers developing application in C / C++ or Java for that matter will not find the .net IDE difficult to adapt to. The classes and libraries used in the Visual Studio.net IDE are common for all the languages in Visual Studio.net which makes it more flexible.