You might have a truly amazing idea for a game, but do you know what to do with it? Transforming your idea into an actual game can be a daunting task. You must have an understanding of game art, programming, audio, and business in order to produce the solid game design document that can turn your really cool idea into a really cool game.

"Game Design for Teens" is here to help you develop the skills you need to do just that. Study several real-world examples and learn from the experience of industry professionals as you focus on the techniques and elements that go into creating a game design document. Get ready to set your idea into motion as you turn it from a concept into a reality!

Sometimes you just need to solve a problem and get on with your work. To that end, Visual Basic 2008 Recipes is a compendium of practical solutions for busy VB .NET programmers. Create time for the more interesting aspects of your VB .NET project by solving common problems with the practical solutions and dozens of code examples in this book. Important new .NET 3.5 technologies, such as Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) and Language Integrated Query (LINQ), are covered, and each chapter addresses a specific problem domain, including database access, multimedia, XML manipulation, networking, and security. The code is free to download so you can use the recipes immediately.

• Take advantage of quality, ready–made solutions to common Visual Basic programming problems.
• Avoid the tedium of having to reinvent the wheel. Focus instead on the more interesting problems specific to your application.
• Learn from and be inspired by what the authors have done. Use their work as stepping stones to solve even more complex problems.

What you’ll learn

• Cleanly separate user–interface logic from business logic through the use of .NET 3.5’s WPF.
• Store data to and retrieve data from your relational database using LINQ.
• Manipulate XML data using LINQ.
• Make your programs dynamically configurable through the judicious application of reflection.
• Take advantage of multiple CPU cores by writing multithreaded applications.
• Integrate multimedia into your Visual Basic projects.

VBA helps you put your computer in its place Write programs that automate tasks and make Office 2007 work better for you If your computer is becoming your boss instead of your servant, start using VBA to tell it what to do! Here's the latest on the VBA IDE and program containers, debugging and controlling your programs, working with multiple applications using a single program, and the most exciting stuff — programming for all the Office 2007 applications.

Discover how to
Customize an application's interface
Quick-launch a VBA program
Store and modify information
Use VBA with the Ribbon
Understand object-oriented programming
Avoid runtime errors

Beginning VB 2008 Databases teaches you everything you need to know about relational databases, SQL, and ADO.NET 2.0, giving you a sound start in developing console and Windows database applications. The book also includes chapters on the new SQL Server XML data type and the forthcoming LINQ enhancements to the next version of Visual Basic.

In addition to teaching you database basics like using SQL to communicate with databases, this book provides you with detailed, code-practical techniques to access data in Visual Basic 2008 across a range of coding situations. Code-heavy and full of practical detail, this book has been fully revised and upgraded for .NET 3.5 and offers you the best contemporary practice in this core programming area, so that you’ll find yourself using it in nearly all your .NET projects.

• Provides step-by-step instructions on how to install and configure necessary tools
• Presents all essential SQL query and update concepts and syntax, so you don’t need prior familiarity with relational databases or SQL
• Describes how to use ADO.NET transactions, exceptions, and events
• Covers ADO.NET features for handling XML, text, and binary data within a Visual Basic 2008 context
• Explains all concepts through straightforward code examples

This book is for anyone who wants to write good Visual Basic 2008 code – even if you have never programmed before.

Writing good code can be a challenge, there are so many options, especially in a language like Visual Basic. If you want to really get the best from a programming language you need to know which features work best in which situations and understand their strengths and weaknesses. It is this understanding that makes the difference between coding and coding well.

Beginning VB 2008 has been written to teach you how to use the Visual Basic programming language to solve problems. From the earliest chapters, and from the first introductory concepts, you'll be looking at real-world programming challenges and learning how Visual Basic can be used to overcome them. As you progress through the book the problems become more involved and interesting while the solutions become correspondingly more complex and powerful as Visual Basic features interact to achieve the results that you want.

Visual Basic 2005, together with the .NET Framework, provides a wonderfully powerful development environment. With these tools, developers can build amazingly powerful applications relatively quickly and easily.

With this power, however, comes great complexity. Many books are available that discuss the Visual Basic language, and if you need to build a relatively simple application, those are generally sufficient. No books, however, address the complex issues that surround the development of more complicated Visual Basic applications. None discuss design, modeling, user-interface design, or testing for Visual Basic applications.

This book is intended for advanced Visual Basic programmers. It assumes that you already have experience with Visual Basic 2005 and are comfortable with the language. The book does not cover any language fundamentals, and does not include any refresher material. If you feel that you need more experience with Visual Basic, see my book Visual Basic 2005 Programmer’s Reference (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2005).

Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation provides the foundation for building applications and high–quality user experiences in Windows Vista. WPF blends application user interface, documents, and media content to provide richer control, design, and development of the visual aspects of Windows programs.

Author Matthew MacDonald shows you how WPF really works. His no–nonsense, practical advice will get you building high–quality WPF applications quickly and easily. MacDonald will take you through a thorough investigation of the more advanced aspects of WPF, and its relation to other elements of the WinFX stack and the .NET Framework 3.5, to complete your understanding of WPF and VB 2008.

WPF’s functionality extends to support for Tablet PCs and other forms of input device, and provides a more modern imaging and printing pipeline, accessibility and UI automation infrastructure, data–driven UI and visualization, as well as the integration points for weaving the application experience into the Windows shell.

Visual Basic Orcas Programmer's Reference is a language tutorial and a reference guide to the upcoming Orcas release of Visual Basic. The tutorial provides basic material suitable for beginners but also includes in-depth content for more advanced developers.

The second part of the book is a reference that quickly allows programmers to locate information for specific language features. The entries in these appendices allow the reader to quickly review the details of important programming, objects, properties, methods, and events.

This book is for anyone who wants to write good Visual Basic 2008 code – even if you have never programmed before.

Writing good code can be a challenge, there are so many options, especially in a language like Visual Basic. If you want to really get the best from a programming language you need to know which features work best in which situations and understand their strengths and weaknesses. It is this understanding that makes the difference between coding and coding well.

Beginning VB 2008 has been written to teach you how to use the Visual Basic programming language to solve problems. From the earliest chapters, and from the first introductory concepts, you'll be looking at real-world programming challenges and learning how Visual Basic can be used to overcome them. As you progress through the book the problems become more involved and interesting while the solutions become correspondingly more complex and powerful as Visual Basic features interact to achieve the results that you want.

By the time you've finished reading this book and worked through the sample exercises, you'll be a confident and very competent Visual Basic programmer. You will still have many explorations of the .NET Framework API to look forward to in your future career, but you will have a firm foundation to build from and you will know exactly where to go to find the things that you need to progress confidently in your projects.

Visual Basic 2008 offers powerful new features, and Accelerated VB 2008 is the fastest path to mastering them, and the rest of Visual Basic, for both experienced Visual Basic programmers moving to VB 2008 and programmers moving to Visual Basic from another object–oriented language. Many books introduce VB, but very few also explain how to use it optimally with the .NET common language runtime (CLR). This book teaches both core Visual Basic language concepts and how to wisely employ VB idioms and object–oriented design patterns to exploit the power of VB and the CLR.

Accelerated VB 2008 is both a rapid tutorial and a permanent reference. You’ll quickly master VB syntax while learning how the CLR simplifies many programming tasks. You’ll also learn best practices that ensure your code will be efficient, reusable, and robust. Why spend months or years discovering the best ways to design and code VB when this book will show you how to do things the right way, right from the start?

• Comprehensively and concisely explains both Visual Basic 2005 and Visual Basic 2008 features
• Focuses on the language itself and on how to use Visual Basic 2008 proficiently for all .NET application development
• Concentrates on how VB features work and how to best use them for robust, high–performance code

What you’ll learn

• How VB works with and exploits the CLR
• How to use arrays and collections
• How to handle events with delegates
• How to design and use generic types and methods
• How to thread efficiently and robustly
• How the new VB 2008 anonymous types, lamba expressions, and extension methods work and how to use them