Programming Visual Basic 2005

Preface

This is not your typical Visual Basic book.

This is not a reference book. This is not a primer on the language. This is not a book of white papers hyping .NET.

The goal of this book is to make you immediately productive, creating Windows and Web applications using Visual Basic and its associated tools.

By creating applications, you will learn Visual Basic as it has evolved for .NET. You'll see how to use the tools effectively, and you'll learn the details of building robust object-oriented applications.

The focus of this book is on building Windows applications and building Web applications (including Web Services). In a sense, this is really two books in one. The first book could have been called Building Windows Applications with Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2005, and the second Building Web Applications And Web Services with Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2005. By putting them in a single volume, we can combine all the supplemental and background material, and give you more bang for your buck.

Tip

If you only want to build web applications, skip right to Part II. Don't worry, you'll be fine, and you can always come back to Part I when you need to build a Windows application.

What You Need to Know About This Book

This book assumes you are already a Visual Basic programmer (probably VB6, but possibly VB.NET Version 1.x). Thus, I'm not going to explain what an if statement is. (If you don't know what an if statement is, or if you just want a thorough review, please read Chapters 16 to 18, which provide a primer on the Visual Basic 2005 language and object-oriented programming. We stuck them in the back so that you can ignore them if you'd like.)

Tip

If this is your first programming language, don't panic, you will learn everything you need to know as we go. You might want to take a quick peek at Chapter 16 now and again if you're feeling lost.

This book includes notes along the way pointing out especially dangerous pitfalls for VB6 and VB.NET 1.x programmers.

While Visual Basic is now a fully object-oriented language, we're not going to start with an introduction to the theory of object-oriented programming. It will be much more satisfying, and much more effective, just to start programming with objects, and I'll include sidebars that explain the theory in context.

Tip

If you really want a primer on object-oriented programming, be sure to read Chapter 18, which I wrote at the insistence of my editor. It is boring, but at least it is short.

Most important, I'm not going to waste your time. You won't find a long treatise on why .NET is great. (It is great, but you are here already, and what is the point of selling you on a technology you've already bought?) You also won't find a theoretical exposition on the role of .NET framework or on all the associated tools; instead you'll use the tools and the framework, and I'll put it all in context as we go about our business of building applications.

Finally, I'm not going to waste your time by filling pages with material that is otherwise freely available. I'll show you how to get the information you need, but I won't waste page after page with tables listing all the properties and methods of each class; that information is already available to you in the built-in help files.