In my opinion, the native code compiler is one of the most important features of Visual Basic, partly because it helps Visual Basic gain respectability in the eyes of the many developers who've resisted trying Visual Basic simply because of its "toy language" image. Mostly, however, I like the native code compiler because it lets Visual Basic do new things that simply weren't appropriate in the past. For example, until recently, Visual Basic was a poor choice for tasks such as high-speed animated games, three-dimensional graphics transformations, ray-tracing algorithms, and so on. Figure 17 shows the compiler options on the Compile tab of the Project Properties dialog box, which is displayed when you choose Project Properties from the Project menu.
Figure 1-7. The Compile tab of the Project Properties dialog box.
High-speed number crunching, three-dimensional graphics creation, and similar computations will benefit the most from the compiler, but all Visual Basic applications will now run faster when compiled. Visual Basic uses the same compiler technology as found in Visual C++, and you can even debug your compiled code using the Visual C++ environment if you want.