Practical Standards for Microsoft Visual Basic [With]

This is a very good book for someone looking for a set of standards for writing Visual Basic code. The author covers pretty much all VB topics as related to coding standards. I've been programming in VB for many years, so much of this was not new to me, but it did have some helpful tips. His chapter on comments is very good and had some helpful insight for writing better comments. The last chapter covers how to set up Visual Source Safe, a topic that I was interested to see included here. It is somewhat unrelated, but it is in fact a very useful step-by-step guide to setting up this tool for source code control. This alone makes this book worthwhile if you're not using VSS now and would like to.

I have read countless VB articles, and books, and have often longed for a one-stop resource about structured VB programming. When working with different teams over different periods of time, I have often found that little or no standards are in place. Consequently, the time to get a feel for someone else's code can sometimes be more than the time to fix it. Foxall's book isn't an end all to programming in VB. And some may feel that he is telling you how to code, and stifiling what many programmers fear-their individuality. This simply isn't the case. Foxall breaks down all the aspects of a VB project, and how to best document, declare, write, and design your code.This is the most practical book I have ever read. Thanks for a wonderful book. And more thanks for something that's equally as practical.

James' presentation of the material and solid examples of the subject matter are worth many times the retail price of this book. Any devloper who works with a team of developers will see results and value in implementing even just a few of James' suggestions. Even if a developer is not in a team environment, implementing standards will allow the code to be easier to understand to others or to the same person in the future when changes will need to be made.I wish more developers would follow the suggestion of the book to take steps to increase the readability and maintainability of their code. Being in a position where I have inherited numerous projects from numerous developers, i can only dream of the hours I would have saved had their code been formatted in a similar fashion, and using a standard for variable names would have been like winning the lottery!This book is a great foundation and starting point for the Visual Basic Developer (new to programming or with experience) to begin to implement Code Standards and increase the readability and maintainability of their code.I cannot express eloquently enough the relief I felt in finding a standards book aimed solely at Visual Basic since most standards books are aimed at C/C++.I highly recommend this book to every Visual Basic Developer and believe that every developer should keep this book within reach at all times in their developing environment.A sincere thank-you to Mr. Foxall for taking the time to do what we all *know* needs to be done in standardizing our code and releasing his findings to us in such a well-designed format and proving his assertions with real code blocks to show the incorrect vs. a more correct way of accomplishing the task.If you are a Visual Basic programmer, you *NEED* this book. The e-version of the book on the included CD-ROM is just awesome and makes this book even more useful since you can have an electronic copy at your disposal when you need it.

The author has obviously written Visual Basic code for a living. His work has a definate 'been there' feel to it. He offers practical advice on writing better code and creating better user-interfaces.I found the chapter on architecting modules and procedures particularly helpful. While most books don't lend themselves well to an on-line format, this book's on-line format on the CD is exceptional in that it makes it easy to reference the material - which you'll want to do often.I keep mine with my staples: Code Complete and Dan Appleman's Guide to the API.b

Thank you thank you thank you! As a person in charge of 5 programmers, I can tell you that managing code of 5 people sometimes feels like I'm managing 5 different projects in 5 different languages.Mr. Foxall has put together a book that will now allow code to be written consistently and efficiently. Now, if someone quits, it will be so much easier to have someone else take over their code. That isn't to say that it's going to be easy to get our older code up to using these standards. Actually, it will take a bit of work (we should have been doing these things all along, but never knew exactly what to do). I'm going to get a copy for all of our developers.Kudos!