Product Description

What is this book about?

Microsoft considers Visual Basic.NET to be the language of choice for applications where developer productivity is a top priority. It offers you the ability to program against the .NET Framework, and the most recent version includes tools for programming today’s hot mobile applications. This code–laden reference covers VB.NET 2003 from start to finish.

These pages help you discover how to apply object–oriented concepts in design and development to create effective business applications. You will be able to access data using ADO.NET, integrate VB.NET with XML, create both Windows applications and Web services, and much more. Finally, you explore best practices for deploying .NET applications and understand the power of VB.NET in development that targets the Internet as easily as the desktop.

What does this book cover?

Here are just a few of the things you′ll discover in this book: 

• How to create new namespaces and import and alias existing namespaces within projects
• Error–handling methods using the Try...Catch...Finally structure
• How to work with data binding and update the underlying data source in Windows applications
• Methods for developing multithreaded applications
• How .NET Remoting is used to exchange serialized objects between clients and servers
• The differences between Mobile Web and .NET Compact Framework applications

Who is this book for?

This book is for experienced developers who are making the transition to VB.NET or seeking a deeper understanding of the most common VB.NET programming tasks and concepts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #419529 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1056 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
VB.NET is Microsoft's more powerful and elegant replacement for VB, designed to work with its .NET platform. As Professional VB.NET points out in the introduction, it has basically the same functionality as C# and C++ for .NET, including full OO. It's interesting that it also points out the many problems with VB--problems that used to be glossed over--while enthusing about VB.NET. The improvements though are real, as you'll quickly appreciate.

Professional VB.NET covers the new IDE, CLR, changes to types--including the new Object class--and Namespaces among others. You'll learn the new error-handling methods including Try/Catch/Finally and the creation and deployment of classes and controls, inheritance from controls, composite controls and so on. The OO warnings, with examples, of the dangers involved in inheritance are particularly welcome. Backward compatibility with COM is covered as is running VB.NET code disguised as a COM object. XML, the underlying data storage format--is covered along with Web forms, though Web programming is left to companion volume, Professional ASP.NET.

Professional VB.NET is thorough, with plenty of worked examples, but assumes you're already familiar with VB. Unlike many previous VB.NET titles it's based on release code rather than the beta. With Professional VB.NET working VB programmers can move to VB.NET on the fly. --Steve Patient

From the Publisher
This book is primarily aimed at experienced Visual Basic developers who want to make the transition to VB.NET. It will also be of benefit to programmers with a good grounding in VB.NET who want to step up to a professional level.

From the Back Cover
Microsoft^® considers Visual Basic^® .NET to be the language of choice for applications where developer productivity is a top priority. It offers you the ability to program against the .NET Framework, and the most recent version includes tools for programming today’s hot mobile applications. This code–laden reference covers VB.NET 2003 from start to finish.

These pages will help you discover how to apply object–oriented concepts in design and development to create effective business applications. You will be able to access data using ADO.NET, integrate VB.NET with XML, create both Windows^® applications and Web services, and much more. Finally, you will explore best practices for deploying .NET applications and understand the power of VB.NET in development that targets the Internet as easily as the desktop.

What you will learn from this book

• How to create new namespaces and import and alias existing namespaces within projects
• Error–handling methods using the Try...Catch...Finally structure
• How to work with data binding and update the underlying data source in Windows applications
• Methods for developing multithreaded applications
• How .NET Remoting is used to exchange serialized objects between clients and servers
• The differences between Mobile Web and .NET Compact Framework applications

Who this book is for

This book is for experienced developers who are making the transition to VB.NET or seeking a deeper understanding of the most common VB.NET programming tasks and concepts.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real–world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

Customer Reviews

Another high quality and informative book from Wrox
This book is in the same league as all the other Wrox Press books - high quality and very informative. Even though VB.NET is still in Beta 2 with the majority of features in place for the final version, this book does very well to explain whats new and how to migrate from VB6 to VB.NET. There are lots of examples in each of the many sections and the authors do an excellent job of explaining how things are different to VB6, what to watch out for and other good bits of advice. One assumption is made, and stated at the start of the book, and that is that you do have a firm grasp of VB6. Without it, you'll quickly get lost in this book and VB.NET in general. But if you have been using VB6 for a while, you'll sail though the 900+ pages and be well versed in VB.NET at the end of it.

Great starting point for VB.Net
If you're familiar with previous versions of VB, in particular VB6, you'll find this book a great introduction to VB.Net.

There is a lot to learn, inheritance, garbage collection, windows forms, web forms, web services, etc. The list is endless! No, this book can't describe every single feature of the .Net framework, but at least it clearly describes the essential things that would be so hard to find/understand without a book like this.

For me, this book was invaluable.

Not bad at all
This book does not help you migrate from VB6, it only tells new features in the .NET architecture. It is recomended for experienced VB programmers or VB programmers with experience of some other object oriented programing (OOP) knowledge. For the not very experienced programmer, I'll wait until the proper .NET release comes out, this book is based on the Beta 2 version.