This book is meant to give you a head start on the changes from Visual Basic to Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET). Most of the book assumes that you are comfortable with Visual Basic 6.0 (VB6), so the book endeavors to be a quick introduction to the major differences between VB6 and the new VB.NET.

I’ve been using Visual Basic since version 1.0. The most dramatic shift had been in the move from VB3 to VB4, when class modules were introduced, and VB started on its long, slow path to becoming object oriented. For the first time, you could build COM components in VB, leading to an explosion in n-tier application development. VB4 brought COM development to the average programmer, so it was no longer a technology known only to a few C++ developers.

When I first started looking at the differences between VB6 and VB.NET, I realized that the change would be even more significant than it had been from VB3 to VB4. I thought it would be good to put together a book that helped VB6 developers transition to VB.NET. To that end, I pitched the idea for a book named something like Migrating from VB to VB.NET to a couple of different companies. Sams Publishing liked the idea, and one day they called me and asked me about doing a miniature version of the book…in three weeks.

Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET is the ultimate guide to using the MS .NET forms package. Readers will learn how to build applications that take full advantage of both the rich user interface features of the MS Windows operating system and the deployment features traditionally associated with HTML-based applications.

Authors Chris Sells and Justin Gehtland draw upon their WinForms research and programming experience to go beyond the Windows Forms documentation to give you a clear picture of exactly how Visual Basic .NET programmers can use WinForms. Readers will gain an understanding of the rationale behind aspects of WinForms design and learn how to avoid or solve common problems. Throughout the book, detailed illustrations of WinForms user interface features and working code samples demonstrate best practices. All code has been tested with Visual Studio .NET 1.1 and is available at www.sellsbrothers.com, where readers will also find updates to the book.

When writing this book, we had two target audiences in mind. We wanted to provide real-world WinForms coverage for both the programmer who has already programmed in .NET and for the programmer who hasn’t. Toward that end, we briefly introduce core .NET topics as they come up. However, the .NET Framework itself is a large area that this book doesn’t pretend to cover completely. Instead, when we think more information would be useful, we reference another work that provides the full details. In particular, we find that we’ve referenced Essential .NET, by Don Box, with Chris Sells, a great deal, making it a good companion to this book. In this same category, we also recommend Pragmatic ADO.NET, by Shawn Wildermuth, Advanced .NET Remoting, by Ingo Rammer, .NET Web Services, by Keith Ballinger, and Applied MS .NET Framework Programming, by Jeffrey Richter.

Visual Basic .NET Power Coding is the experienced developer’s guide to mastering advanced Visual Basic .NET concepts. Paul Kimmel saves readers time and money by providing thorough explanations of essential topics so you can quickly begin creating robust programs that have fewer bugs. He also demonstrates important concepts by using numerous real-world examples that include working code that has been tested against Visual Basic .NET 2003.After a brief review of language idioms, Kimmel moves to more advanced techniques that help programmers solve their most challenging problems. Central to advanced development and deployment are chapters on security, Web services, ASP.NET programming, COM Interop, and Remoting. This book also covers thin client programming, which offers businesses a real solution to managing deployment and upgrades with Windows Forms using Reflection and HTTP. An appendix walks readers through migrating Visual Basic 6.0 applications to Visual Basic .NET. A companion Web site includes the complete downloadable source code, extensive reusable examples, and updates from the author.

I wrote this book for professionals who have gotten past the basics and are ready for some torque. This book assumes you have read an introductory book on VB .NET, progressed through a more advanced book like Visual Basic .NET Unleashed [Kimmel 2002b], and are now ready to turn on the hyperdrive.

This book will help you solve more than 300 of the most common and not-so-common tasks that working Visual Basic 2005 programmers face every day. If you’re a seasoned .NET developer, beginning Visual Basic programmer, or a developer seeking a simple and clear migration path from VB6 to Visual Basic 2005, the Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook delivers a practical collection of problem-solving recipes for a broad range of Visual Basic programming tasks.

The concise solutions and examples in the Visual Basic 2005 Cookbook range from simple tasks to the more complex, organized by the types of problems you need to solve. Nearly every recipe contains a complete, documented code sample showing you how to solve the specific problem, as well as a discussion of how the underlying technology works and that outlines alternatives, limitations, and other considerations. As with all O’Reilly Cookbooks, each recipe helps you quickly understand a problem, learn how to solve it, and anticipate potential tradeoffs or ramifications.

With the release of .NET 2.0, the Visual Basic .NET programming language has been officially renamed as Visual Basic 2005—perhaps in an attempt to highlight the fact that the BASIC language used with the .NET platform has nothing to do with the COM-centric VB 6.0. As you would guess, VB 2005 adds even more language features to a developer’s tool chest such as operator overloading, custom conversion routines, and generics. For all practical purposes, there really is no difference between VB 2005, C#, or any other .NET programming language. Now more than ever, an individual’s language of choice is based on personal preferences rather than the language’s overall feature set.In any case, regardless of which group you identify with, I do welcome you to this book. The overall approach I will be taking is to treat VB 2005 as aunique member of the BASIC family. As you read over the many chapters that follow, you will be exposed to the syntax and semantics of VB 2005, dive into each of the major .NET code libraries (Windows Forms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, XML web services, etc.), and have athorough grounding in object-oriented development.

AppDev’s Exploring ASP.NET Using Visual Basic 2005 course provides a general overview of the exciting and powerful new features in ASP.NET 2.0. The course introduces many of the new ASP.NET server controls, shows how to incorporate the new membership, profile and personalization features, examines new data caching and data binding features, and more. This course will prepare upgrading ASP.NET developers to be productive with new features as soon as possible.
Course includes 9+ hours of total training time…

• 6 modules of training
• Over 9 hours of media run time
• Sample code

Visual Basic For Application (VBA for short) is a programming environment designed to work with MS Office applications (Word, Excel, Access and Power Point). components in each application (for example, worksheets or documents) are exposed as objects to the programmer to use and manipulate to a desired end. Almost anything you cand do through the normal use of the Office application can also be automated thourgh programming.VBA is a complete programming language, but you can’t use it outside the application in which it is integrated. This does not mean VBA can be integrated only with Office programs. Any software vendor that decides to implement VBA can include it with their application.

VBA is relatively easy to learn, but to use it in a new application, you must first become familiar with the “object model” of the application. For example, the “Document” and “Dictionary” objects are specific to the Word object mode, whereas the “workbook”, “Worksheet” and “Range” objects are specific to the Excel object model. As you proceed through this book, you will see that the Excel Object model is faifly extensive; however, if you are familiar with Excel, you will find that using theese objects is generally straightforward.

This book covers ADO .NET programming using VB .NET, which means there’s a great deal of material to work with: the basics of the ADO .NET object model, Web Services, typed and untyped DataSets, DataAdapters, ASP .NET, and DataBinding. ADO .NET is intended to be the future of data access as far as Microsoft is concerned, and we’ll see it all here.With ADO.NET, you can build database-enabled applications and Web services with more speed, flexibility, and power than ever before. ADO.NET Programming in Visual Basic .NET teaches you all you’ll need to know to make the most of ADO.NET - whether you’re an experienced Visual Basic database programmer or not. The authors’ realistic code examples and practical insights illuminate ADO.NET from its foundations to state-of-the-art data binding and application optimization.

The book concludes with a complete case study application - constructing a .NET version of the powerful ADO data control that VB 6 programmers loved, but isn’t included in ADO.NET.

For many years now, Microsoft Access has allowed users all over the world to design and develop Windows-based database applications. Microsoft Office Access 2003 continues to be the world’s most popular database. This book is for people who have already mastered the use of Microsoft Access databases and now are ready for the next step —programming. Access 2003 Programming by Example with VBA, XML, and ASP takes non-programmers through the detailed steps of creating Access databases from scratch and then shows them how to retrieve and manage their data programmatically using various programming languages and techniques.With this book at hand, users can quickly build the toolset required for developing their own database solutions. This book proves that, given the right approach, programming an Access database from scratch and controlling it via programming code can be as easy as designing and maintaining databases with Access built-in tools. Anyone interested in learning how to get started with VBA programming in Access will benefit from this book’s 303 hands-on examples and 11 step-by-step projects.

This book gives a practical overview of many programming languages and techniques necessary in programming and maintaining today’s Access databases.

Though most programmers use two or more languages, they usually have a mastery of one. Although Microsoft has advertised that the .NET runtime is language agnostic and that C# and Visual Basic .NET are so close that switching between the two is really quite easy, that?s only true up to a point. Some of the differences are obvious, but others are very subtle. C# & VB.NET Conversion Pocket Reference helps you easily make the switch from one language to another. The differences occur in three main areas: syntax, object-oriented principles, and the Visual Studio .NET IDE. Syntax concerns the statements and language elements. Object oriented differences are less obvious, and concern differences in implementation and feature sets between the two languages. IDE differences include things like compiler settings or attributes. There is also a fourth area of difference: language features that are present in one language but have no equivalent in the other. These unique language features are also covered in this book. C# & VB.NET Conversion Pocket Reference is a perfect companion for documents and books that don?t have examples using your mastered language. Author Jose Mojica expects that you know one of the two languages, but does not make an assumption about which one. He presents the information in a language-neutral point of view so that programmers from either background can read a section and feel that it is targeted to them.