Faster Smarter Beginning Programming

Key Points

• The MSDN Library (which Visual Studio .NET provides through Help) provides the best way to look for built-in functions and find out how to use them.

• Type Conversion functions convert values from one data type to another. If a conversion is possible, there’s probably a built-in function that does it.

• Logical functions are useful for making comparisons that operators can’t. Also, in some situations, a logical function can do in one line what If and Select Case statements would take many lines to do.

• Visual Basic .NET provides an abundance of functions for working with Date values. These make it easy to perform date arithmetic and extract portions of dates.

• Built-in functions strongly support string handling. These functions make it easy ...