Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005: The Language

I have read through a few best selling VB.NET books and I believe this is the best book on the topic. The best part about this book is that it does not give the rehashed technical manual feeling that most other books would give you. Instead, you can tell the author had been planning to write this book for a while and he added many fine details about VB.NET and Framework which might have been puzzling you. However this book only comvers the core topics and there are some other fine details which are missed, so I recommend you reading together with Visual Basic 2005 Programmer's Reference (Programmer to Programmer). That book gives you the rehashed feeling, though.

As usual , Mr. Balena's books are piece of art, this one is no difference , super writing style , very well organized , excellent code snippets , I just wish there was a 100 pages chapter on ADO.NET 2.0 new features, anyway I found Glenn Johnson's Programming ADO.NET 2.0 a very well substitute for that topic missing here.

I have had Balena's book since Visual Basic 6.0, then his Programming Visual Basic.NET, then I got his 2003 edition of the book. I really like the fact that he separated the important topic of "The Language" as he did it this time. You can find books on ADO.NET elsewhere and that's how it should be because these topics can be quite vast in itself. So I find the approach he took is more helpful. The improved platform of Visual Studio is remarkable in my opinion and it seems I can get more done now with less code than ever before on some features. A quick note: When I first started reading Balena's first book on .NET, I was completely lost. And he even suggested it was not for "beginners", but if you persevere, you will slowly begin to comprehend what .NET is all about. It takes time..But as you learn the concepts, Balena's books becomes all the more clear. So hang in there...And if you are searching for help in understanding what .NET is about, you have certainly come to the right book. Hope this review helps -

There haven't been many good books that take Visual Basic .NET seriously as a full-featured Object Oriented Programming language for the .NET platform. Every other book on VB .NET is nothing but screenshot after screenshot of "drag-and-drop" development using Visual Studio. Programming with the .NET framework encompasses a huge spectrum of things to learn. VB .NET the language, Visual Studio IDE, ASP .NET , ADO .NET, Windows Forms, Windows Services, Serviced Components and Interop are some of those things. After trying many VB books out there, I can confidently say that covering the entire breadth of topics makes a book shallow. This book picks a select few of the above-mentioned topics and drills very deep into them. It focuses on the language constructs and shows us better programming techniques. Going through a few chapters, I've already learned many ways to write better code. I'm glad this book doesn't spend a few hundred pages on ADO.NET and ASP.NET (there are some very good books that cover those topics... see below). Doing so would have taken space away from the valuable (and rare) content on the language itself. This book won't show you how to create a drag-and-drop Windows/Web app. What it will do is make you a much better programmer. Here's a list of some of the best books for VB Developers currently for sale: - For Database Programming: Pro ADO.NET 2.0 (Sahil Malik; Apress) - For ASP.NET Web Development: Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference (Dino Esposito; MS Press) - Best-practices for .NET: Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic and Microsoft Visual C# Developers (Francesco Balena, Giuseppe Dimauro; MS Press) - Good overall crash-course to get things started: Programming Visual Basic 2005 (Jesse Liberty; O'Reilly) And of course, to master the most fundamental thing of all, the language itself, I recommend this book.

I am writing a "review" of my own book to ensure that potential buyers know exactly what the book contains, how it is structured, and why. First and foremost, this book does **NOT** cover all the topics that its 2002 and 2003 editions do. Most notably, it doesn't cover Windows Forms, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, plus other advanced topics such as serviced components, and security. The point is, there are so many new things in the .NET Framework 2.0 and a single book can't cover them with the necessary level of detail. If I had squeezed all these topics in a 1400-page book (which is the largest book my publisher would allow me to write), the result wouldn't be satisfactory anyway. If you are interested in these high-level topics, you should purchase a book with a narrower focus, for example the excellent "Programming ASP.NET" by Dino Esposito. After a lot of hard thinking, I decided to focus solely on important topics that, in my opinion, very few books cover adequately, namely the Visual Basic 2005 language and the most important base classes in the .NET Framework 2.0: basic data types, arrays and collections, resources, files and streams, object serialization, threading, PInvoke and COM interop. After I took the decision, I had to face the problem of choosing the best title for the new edition. Some portions of this book are taken from its previous editions, therefore the title should have been close enough to make the relation clear. At the same time, the title should have been different enough to emphasize that it isn't a new edition the **same** book. In the end, I opted for appending "The Language" to the original title, hoping that this difference was apparent enough as to have readers of previous edition look more closely at its Table of Contents and understand that some chapters were missing. The new edition covers in all the new features of the language a very detailed manner, including generics, the My Namespace, unsigned integers, partial classes, operator overloading, and custom events. But this book is more than just a reference book; rather, it is about **programming techniques** that you can implement with Visual Basic 2005 and base classes in the .NET Framework 2.0. For example, I devote an entire chapter to explain how reflection can be useful to solve recurring programming problems in a very elegant manner, whereas another chapter describes how you can custom attributes to implement plug-ins for Windows Forms application and n-tier, data-centric applications. The chapter on regular expressions shows how you can use this under-utilized .NET feature to parse html files, read comma-delimited and fixed-length data files, perform quite sophisticated input data validation, and more. Finally, it makes little sense to focus on the language and know nothing about the IDE, and for this reason the book devotes over 110 pages to improving productivity by means of the old and new features of Visual Studio, such as macros, code snippets, trace