Visual Basic .NET Unleashed

After an in-depth tutorial on the new IDE available in Visual Studio .NET, the author digs in with a fast-moving tour of VB .NET language features (including coverage of changes from VB6). The text starts with basic and then advanced topics, but its real emphasis is on advanced class design using classes and interfaces, with some excellent material on inheritance and polymorphism, as well as taking advantage of VB .NET's support for properties and reflection, among other topics. By continually advising how to rewrite classes to improve their maintainability, the author raises the bar here by presenting some tips and best practices beyond the obvious, using techniques invented by the Extreme Programming (XP) movement.

Later chapters turn to the basics of using Windows Forms and graphics programming (with GDI+), as well as ADO.NET for building database-driven Web applications. The book finishes with a nicely comprehensive listing of all VB6 to VB .NET changes, an invaluable resource for those making this transition.

If you are going to learn to design with objects, you might as well learn to do it right, this guide argues, using the expertise garnered from other programming languages. In all, this title shows how VB .NET supports basic and advanced object-oriented design features. It will be most profitably read by those with some previous object-oriented programming experience, though it will also benefit the beginner who wants to be challenged with some expert advice to get the most out of the new object support available in VB .NET. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: In-depth introduction to the Visual Studio .NET IDE (including common project tasks, configuration options, debugging, and built-in views), VB6 versus VB .NET language tutorial (including new .NET data types, variables, arrays, collections, and exception handling); extending VS .NET with macros (including Add-ins and Wizards), procedures and parameters, recursion, structures, enumerated types, reflection APIs, object-oriented design tutorial, (classes, access specifiers, properties, methods, nested classes), events in VB .NET: delegates and event handlers, inheritance and polymorphism (including interfaces), shared members, attributes (plus custom attributes); VB .NET console applications (debugging and running applications), multithreaded applications (lightweight and heavyweight threading), introduction to Windows Forms, GDI+ graphics (including basic shapes, curves and Bezier splines and images), tutorial for Web services (UDDI, DISCO, building and debugging Web services); basic Web programming with ASP.NET and ADO.NET, writing to the event log, list of changes between VB6 and VB .NET, refactoring VB code, and advice for effective object-oriented programming.