Practical Standards for Microsofta Visual Basica .Net

With a new way of coding VB comes new ways of making the environment more effecient for programmers.This book is full of good advice about programming practices in the .NET world. The advice is sound and could be even used as an intro since the author goes through great pains to make everthing clear while concise.Should you follow all the advice? Depends on you. I don't think you should follow anybody's suggestions without some critical thought but the suggestions here are definitely worth taking a look at and debating. VB.NET ain't VB6 and you should not code and organize your code the way you did in VB6. Foxall gives us some good, pratical advice on how to code. More importantly, he gives great advice on how to organize code (something programmers tend to be bad at doing).The only surprise was the recommendation to use Hungarian notation. I find it amusing that people get so hung up on Hungarian notation (I happen to like it but would not miss it if I never used it again). It's just a way to try to making code more readable when using local variables. If you think it gets in the way, then you shouldn't use it. Other than that confusing suggestion (MS says don't use Hungarian but you ARE free to use or not to use whatever convention you like) the book is flawless.This is a book that every team doing VB.NET development should discuss if not follow. Standards are important, most of the software building cycle is in testing, debugging and modifying existing code. His standards are something to draw on as we come up with the best practices for our particular solutions.

I have always been passionate about code conventions and standards. In my early VB days I was weaned on the likes of Stan Leszynski, Greg Reddick, and James Foxall. As I began to investigate moving from the VB6 world to the new .Net landscape, I was eager to find out what James Foxall would think. Especially since he had always been a strong advocate of Hungarian Naming conventions, and the new sounds out of Redmond were recommending against them.James finds the perfect balance, maintaining the true spirit of the Design Guidelines for Class Library Developers found in the .Net Framework documents. The point of the non-Hungarian recommendation is "to encourage consistency and predictability in public APIs while enabling Web and cross-language integration." Of course conventions tied to a particular language's type terminology do not belong on the public interfaces of class libraries. Peter Vogel said as much in the VB6 days with his Object and Component title. (Looking forward to that VB.Net edition, Peter!) But for those who find HN a useful tool, they can still utilize it on the interior of their objects, and remain completely compliant with the .Net docs.Outside this often "thorny" question, the rest of the book is as rock solid as ever, providing guidance and direction on everything from how best to design solutions, projects, and classes, to commenting code and laying out flow constructs. You may not agree with absolutely every recommendation, but you will be hard pressed to find anywhere a more complete standards guide for the .Net platform. Even if you choose not to utilize Hungarian Naming standards, you can benefit greatly from the other code suggestions James provides. It would be a pity to let that one aspect of code conventions prevent you from gleaning from the richness here.Outside of all this, I have to say that James Foxall is one of the most personable developers I have had the pleasure to encounter. When I was seeking information on where to go with .Net, I contacted him directly because I couldn't wait for the book's release. He was most responsive to my questions, and helped me work through just what to think while moving to .Net. This one is on my desk to stay!You will benefit greatly from giving it a read!Kel

I felt the need to post my own review after reading the previous one star slam. When I first saw this, I was . I've spent far more hours than I care to count researching the information contained in this book, and I couldn't imagine why someone would have such a venomous opinion of this book - which I'm very proud of. Click the name of the reviewer, however, to see his/her other reviews and you will find that they dole out 1 star reviews to most of the books they read - can't imagine why they'd continue to purchase books with so many terrible experiencesThis book contains a wealth of information culled from many sources and professional experience. Take a look at the reviews for my other books and you will find that I write high-quality books for professional developers. The Hungarian notation presented conflict with the .NET philosophy, due to the fact that I recommend that Hungarian stay internal to your objects so that your object names and interfaces remain "hungarian free". (In fact, I state the Hungarian is completely optional, but that I and others still feel it has a place). Af far as the content on modules, most of the material is equally applicable to classes. Rather than discuss the material in two places (modules and classes), it is presented in modules first (the easiest to grasp) and the material on classes then builds upon the previous subject matter.Obviously, the previous reviewer "just doesn't get it".At any rate, check out the sample chapter or send me an email with questions and I'll do what I can to help...James

I had read the first edition of this book and really liked it. This new edition is a definite improvement of that other book. Unlike some .NET titles which seem to be a rehash of VB6 code, this book has been truly updated to .NET. Not only does it teach you the best way to do things, you'll also learn some new programming techniques as well because Visual basic.NET is so different from VB 6. The chapter on using the new exception handling was an eye opener. The new chapter on programming objects was a much needed edition to the book and could probably be expanded even more. The distribution chapter has a great checklist that EVERYONE should follow before shipping a product.all in all, a GREAT book! Oh, a bonus is the new edition is hard cover, which is awesome because you use this book as a reference a lot and the paperback edition wouldn't take the abuse as well.