VAST Platform (VA Smalltalk) provides a purely object-oriented, state-of-the-art application development environment for developing Smalltalk applications. With VAST Platform, you can rapidly develop graphical client-server applications for the Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems.

This guide assumes that you have installed VAST Platform. If not, refer to the information on installing and starting the product in the Installation Guide and Getting Started. The VAST Platform installation program also installs a tool called Environments which you can use to create and start a VAST development environment. Again, the Installation Guide and Getting Started will orient you.

If you are new to VAST Platform, we suggest you familiarize yourself with the product and its tool set by reading through Getting Started.

This guide helps you use the VA Smalltalk basic development environment.

This guide does not cover VAST parts-specific aspects of VAST Platform. However, if you are using parts, you will find that you can use the Organizer to perform many of the operations covered in this book. Furthermore, it is still worthwhile to read this guide because all of the concepts described in the guide apply to the visual programming tools as well as the VA Smalltalk basic development environment.

If you are interested in the visual programming paradigm or development from parts, look at the Visual ProgrammingUserGuide for in depth information.