Professional VB.NET, 2nd Edition

This book is the sequel to "Beginning VB.NET 2003". That book of necessity had to devote time to going over basic syntactical material of VB.NET. By contrast, this book is squarely aimed at object oriented material. It shows how to design a problem so as to have natural object classes. From these, the book moves into implementing these under VB. This of course leads immediately into topics like inheritance and interfaces. And how to make a hierarchy of classes. You get to imagine levels of abstraction, like virtual methods in a class, which act as placeholders for actual methods in derived classes. There is a good discussion of the various ways that polymorphism can arise. Other chapters go into the GUI aspects of the language. Secondary emphasis really. These chapters are straightforward. Nothing conceptually hard here. What is striking about the book is that in the OO chapters, if you remove the code examples, much of the text could apply to C++, Java and C#. What Microsoft has done is promote VB to the level of these languages.

This book is for experienced developers who need to make the transition to VB.NET. It will also help programmers with previous knowledge of VB.NET who want to move up to the professional level.The book begins with an introduction to the .NET Framework and common language RunTime(CLR). The CLR is responsible for managing the execution of code compiled for the .NET platform. The next few chapters focus on object oriented programming and how to derive classes from base classes using inheritance. Chapter 9 gives a detailed discussion on how error handling works in VB.NET by discussing the CLR exception handler in detail and the new Try...Catch...Finally structure. An entire chapter is devoted to multi-threading. You will learn how threads can be created, and the differences between multitasking and multi-threading. Chapter 16 discusses COM and .NET component interoperability, and the tools provided to help link the two technologies together. Chapter 18 gives detailed coverage of the ADO.NET data access technology. You will learn how to build flexible, fast, and scalable data access objects and applications.The final chapters discuss building web applications with web forms, creating custom controls for Windows Forms and Web Forms, and finally, creating and consuming Web Services.If you're an experienced VB developer and would like to make the transition to VB.NET, then this book is a must.

As someone who has spent over five years as a professional Visual Basic programmer I don't want to throw away all my knowledge when I move to VB.NET. Fortunately, this (big) book doesn't bother teaching you programming from scratch (you should definitely look elsewhere if you're a complete beginner) but will help you make sense of not only what's changed in the move from VB6 to VB.NET (a lot!) but also what you can take with you from VB6 (a surprisingly large amount actually). This means that you don't have to spend your time working through stuff like "this is a variable", "this is an if statement". Instead the book gets stuck into what makes the .NET Framework and Common Language Runtime tick - and explains how you can relate all of it to VB6.The first third of the book serves as a reference to the VB.NET language - syntax, error handling, objects, inheritance, interfaces, and the differences between variables and types. While this means that you don't get to create many exciting applications early on it does mean that you have a thorough grounding in the essentials of the language.Then the rest of the book takes a look at the most important features of .NET in turn: ADO.NET, XML, Windows Forms, Web Services, Data Binding, Remoting, Networking, Threading, Security, Web Forms, etc. You won't be an expert in any of these areas after you've read the book but you will have a much better idea of what VB.NET is capable of and how to get started using the advanced features of the .NET Framework Class Library.Although there are a lot of authors that wrote on this book, which can spell trouble in my experience, the editors have managed to maintain a consistent voice throughout and there's surprisingly little overlap between chapters. Well worth the money.

I always loved while working with VB 6.0. Right from the release of Visual Studio .NET, I was mainly looking to learn more about VB .NET. I have read a lot about the changes about ASP .NET when compared with classic ASP and I was really keeping my ears open to know about the changes that took place in VB .NET when compared to its predecessor. Well, I ended up in reading this book "Professional VB .NET" written by 14 well known authors. Simple StatisticsAuthor(s): Fred Barwell, Richard Blair, Richard Case, Jonathan Crossland, Bill Forgey, Whitney Hankison, Billy S.Hollis, Rockfort Lhotka, Tim McCarthy, Jonathan Pinnock, Matthew Reynolds, John Roth, Bill Sheldon, Scott Short, Jan Narkiewicz, Rama Ramachandran and Bill Sempf.Publisher: Wrox Pages: 943 Chapters: 25 Table of ContentsChapter 1: Why Do We Need Microsoft .NET?Chapter 2: An Overview of New Features In VB.NETChapter 3: A First Look at a VB.NET ProgramChapter 4: Visual Studio.NET Integrated Development EnvironmentChapter 5: The Common Language RuntimeChapter 6: Variables and TypesChapter 7: NamespacesChapter 8: Windows FormsChapter 9: Error HandlingChapter 10: Creating Windows ControlsChapter 11: Object Syntax IntroductionChapter 12: Inheritance and InterfacesChapter 13: Applying Objects and ComponentsChapter 14: AssembliesChapter 15: ThreadingChapter 16: Working with Classic COM and InterfacesChapter 17: Comopnent ServicesChapter 18: Data Access with ADO.NETChapter 19: Using XML in VB.NETChapter 20: Web FormsChapter 21: Creating Web ControlsChapter 22: Web Services in VB .NETChapter 23: Windows ServicesChapter 24: Deployment in .NETChapter 25: Security in the .NET FrameworkAppendix A: Using the Visual Basic Compatibility LibraryWho is this Book for?This book is primarily aimed at experienced Visual Basic developers. Particularly, it is for those who need to make the transition to VB .NET and want more detailed and up-to-date information. An insight into some of the ChaptersThis books starts with an overview of Microsoft .NET and just how much it changes application development. Understanding these concepts is essential to using VB.NET in the most effective manner. In Chapter 2, the book discusses about the major changes in VB.NET when compared to VB 6.0. If you want to compare VB 6.0 and VB .NET you should read this chapter. Chapter 5 (The Common Language RunTime) is awesome. This has some serious discussions about the evolution of .NET. This chapter also talks about, how Garbage Collector works in VB .NET. In a nut shell, this chapter covers all aspects of VB .NET that you should know. Chapter 6 and 7 discusses about datatypes and Namespaces respectively. Namespaces encapsulate the very building blocks of .NET. Chapter 7 has all about Namespaces. Well, upto Chapter 7, the book gives us an over all idea about the new VB .NET. In the coming chapters, it takes us to the real world of VB .NET. Windows Forms is discussed in Chapter 8. It teaches you how you can create forms in VB .NET. The new

This book is in the same league as all the other Wrox Press books - high quality and very informative. Even though VB.NET is still in Beta 2 with the majority of features in place for the final version, this book does very well to explain whats new and how to migrate from VB6 to VB.NET. There are lots of examples in each of the many sections and the authors do an excellent job of explaining how things are different to VB6, what to watch out for and other good bits of advice. One assumption is made, and stated at the start of the book, and that is that you do have a firm grasp of VB6. Without it, you'll quickly get lost in this book and VB.NET in general. But if you have been using VB6 for a while, you'll sail though the 900+ pages and be well versed in VB.NET at the end of it.