A Preview of VB.NET Programming with the Public Beta

Thanks to those who had kind things to say about this book. Rocky and I had a blast writing it, and we're glad it was helpful.But things have moved way beyond beta one now, and this book is obsolete and out of print. Recently we finished a complete rewrite of this book for the production version of Visual Basic .NET. That new book is called "Fast Track Visual Basic.NET." We used this book as a starting point, but we did a lot of refinement, and we think it's an even better intro to VB.NET. If you liked this book and wanted to recommend it to others, point them to "Fast Track". I've placed a link to it in the section above on alternatives to this book.Billy Hollis

I was very skeptical of this book, as WROX has dropped the ball before, with their "intermediate" type books.Fortunately, this book did a nice job of presenting the new concepts, that we all have to look forward to, and backing them up with concrete examples of how we will have to change our current "code thought" to make them work.I was a bit disappointed with the lack of discussion about some of the larger issues that may present themselves in .NET, like late-binding not being supported; however, all in all, the book covered most other "rumors" that I had heard, and questioned.One other plus, was the coverage of Object Oriented Programming with VB.NET. Having never programmed C, I was glad to see a good deal of attention given to explaining concepts like "encapsulation" and "inheritance", which I, for the most part was unfamiliar.I'm very pleased with this book, and have recommended it to several co-workers, who also purchased it and were happy with it. It's a good buy, and it's good preparation material, for what's to come.

The only other .NET book I've read is the Wrox "Preview of ASP+" which I thought lived up to it's title. For me, this book goes well beyond a preview. I read the whole 433 pages over a span of seven days and with the knowledge I've gained I'm preparing to recommend using the .NET beta technology to begin development on an Enterprise system that (in our architecture) would otherwise require use of Visual C++ and the ATL. Now I know that with VB.NET you can easily create free threaded applications and objects and you can just as easily create Win32 services.Everything you need to know about the changes (and there are many of them) is explained in detail. Chapter 5, covers object-oriented programming for those who are new to the concept and explains how VB.NET handles: inheritance, and function overloading. Even if you can't find it in your local bookstore, buy this book (if you have the public beta of course), after you read this one you'll likely be ready to go in to your manager and build and a case for reasons to mirgate to .NET

I am about to wear this book out because I use it so much. We are currently developing a new product based entirely on Microsoft's .NET platform, and I use this book constantly as a reference whenever I do any VB.NET development. So far, it has answered every question we ahve had.To appreciate this book, you must have done some pretty serious development in Visual Basic 6.0 or another high-level language. It is not an introduction level book, but does a great job of introducing experienced Windows and web developers to the new VB.NET environment. If you fall into this category of developers and are considering a move to the .NET platform, then you definitely want this book!