Practical Standards for Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET (Pro-Developer) [Paperback]

James Foxall (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0735613567 | ISBN-13: 978-0735613560 | Publication Date: August 31, 2002 | Edition: Second Edition

The same attributes that make Visual Basic® .NET exceptionally productive and easy to use can also lead to unexpected problems, especially when you upgrade. Using standardized programming techniques can help you solve those problems so that you can exploit all the power of rapid development—without creating hidden land mines in performance and maintainability. This book shows you proven practices to help you eliminate “voodoo” variables, create interfaces that make users more productive, write self-documenting code, simplify code modifications, and more. Each chapter illustrates common pitfalls and practical solutions with code samples—many from real-world projects. Whether you’re writing just a few lines of code or working with a team to build an enterprise application, you’ll learn how to use practical standards to develop better, more reliable code for every process.

TOPICS COVERED INCLUDE:

• Creating object and project templates
• Designing modules and procedures
• Naming conventions
• Using constants and enumerations
• Variables
• Formatting code
• Commenting code
• Looping structures
• Controlling code flow
• Exception handling
• Programming objects
• File operations
• Debugging
• Interface design
• User input and notification
• Distributing solutions
• Version control
• Source code control

PRAISE FROM THE VISUAL BASIC .NET TEAM

“This book provides a simple remedy for the lax programming style that we can all fall victim to from time to time. It shows you all the practical steps you can take to standardize your code in Visual Basic .NET—from creating object and project templates to using sensible naming conventions, and from commenting and formatting code so that anyone can understand it years later to controlling your source code and distributing your solutions the professional way. This invaluable resource goes beyond teaching how to simply write Visual Basic .NET code—it teaches you how to write your Visual Basic .NET code more effectively.”

Mike Iem, Product Manager, Microsoft Visual Basic .NET

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; Second Edition edition (August 31, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735613567
• ISBN-13: 978-0735613560
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,843,451 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James Foxall, President of Tigerpaw Software, has been involved in commercial software development for over 20 years and was instrumental in the development and creation of Tigerpaw's award winning product suite, serving over 28,000 users in 28 countries. In the 20+ years since joining his family's company full time, James has helped transform Tigerpaw Software from a small "garage" business to one that employs more than 44 people and produces business automation software servicing the IT/Networking, Telecommunications, and Systems Integrator industries. In his current role, James provides the vision and management to keep Tigerpaw focused on its customers and properly serving its markets.

James has a Masters degree in Business Administration and a BS degree in Management of Information Systems. These two degrees dovetail perfectly as James is devoted to creating better businesses through technology. James has written 14 books on technology which have been published in over a dozen languages around the world. He is considered an authority on application interface and behavior standards of Windows applications and serves the business community as an international speaker on Microsoft technologies and best practices for automating business processes in the SMB environment. Viewed as a business and technology expert, James has been featured on several television news shows, as well as in various trade publications and newspaper articles. James' goal for the future is to grow Tigerpaw by continuing to provide software and services that allow customers to not only meet their challenges, but to excel in a constantly changing market.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Somewhat rehashed VB standards book, January 7, 2003

By 

Gregory A. Beamer "Cowboy" (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Practical Standards for Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET (Pro-Developer) (Paperback)

After seeing the author jump in for a review, I decided I would add my two cents into this fray. While I do not agree with the 1 star "slam" that the author set out to counter, I think 3 stars may be pushing it, however.

There is a lot of practical advice in this book. While it should be obvious that a developer needs to set up templates without hard-coding and make all procedures perform very specific duties, we find that this is not the case in code. The book has quite a few good pieces of advice around the basic nature of programming. I will disagree with the author, however, on some points. For example, you should certainly minimize fan out (calling many procedures) for all but control functions, fan-in (multiple procedures using the same procedure) is a sign of very specialized functions, which he advised only two pages earlier.

This book has a whole chapter on naming conventions, using Hungarian. While this is not a cardinal sin, it should be noted that Microsoft has deprecated Hungarian in .NET. The inclusion in the book (chapter 4) suggests that the author has simply updated some of his material from his VB 6 book.

The suggestions for enumerators, commenting, looping and code flow are fairly decent and may help your coding efforts. Mr. Foxall falls a bit short on exception handling taking the tried and true route (see Richter's book for a better methodology). One item of contention is the idea that you handle unexpected as well as anticipated exceptions. In general, handle what you can and catch what you wish to log. Let the rest get handled on the UI to ensure the user does not get an ugly exception message. Most books on the market advocate catching everything, and then rethrowing the same error; what a waste of CPU cycles. In VB 6, you had to handle every exception, and pass it up the stack if you caught anything. In VB.NET, exception handling gives you the ability to catch those exceptions that you can handle or log for debugging a live application. Using finally, especially with objects with a dispose method, is a much better option.

I would agree with the 1 star reviewer on the coverage of modules before objects. Modules are a sloppy method of programming in Visual Basic .NET. They are placed in for VB 6 developers that miss their .bas files. On the other hand, this is not enough reason to kill the chapter, as some of the other advice in the chapter (2) is very useful.

A 2.5 rating would be a bit better as there is some bad advice in this book, but I have to choose between 2 and 3 and would rather give the author the benefit of the doubt. I hope Mr. Foxall has a chance to make a second version of the book that moves completely into the .NET paradigm, as it would be much more useful to developers.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Guide For All VB.NET Programmers, March 10, 2004

By 

"lukeo" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Practical Standards for Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET (Pro-Developer) (Paperback)

This is a good book for both the experienced and beginning Visual Basic .NET programmer.

The purpose of this book is not to show you how to write a program in VB.NET but to provide a style template on how you should write a program; not only for readability but also for maintainability. To that end Foxall provides many examples of "bad" programming practices and styles along with a suggested "good" one.

The whole argument about using Hungarian notation (HN) or not is really irreverent. The very fact that this book exists and is hopefully read by more than a handful of people means more consistency and more error-free code.

One of the things I appreciate in this book is the use of color (various shades of blue-green) to mark things like comments in code, section headers, etc.

Overall this book was an easy read and can easily be grasped by entry level VB.NET programmers and functional enough for more experienced programmers to reference.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect for beginners and Managers alike, November 7, 2002

By 

Edwin Luciano - See all my reviews

This review is from: Practical Standards for Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET (Pro-Developer) (Paperback)

With a new way of coding VB comes new ways of making the environment more effecient for programmers.

This book is full of good advice about programming practices in the .NET world. The advice is sound and could be even used as an intro since the author goes through great pains to make everthing clear while concise.

Should you follow all the advice? Depends on you. I don't think you should follow anybody's suggestions without some critical thought but the suggestions here are definitely worth taking a look at and debating. VB.NET ain't VB6 and you should not code and organize your code the way you did in VB6. Foxall gives us some good, pratical advice on how to code. More importantly, he gives great advice on how to organize code (something programmers tend to be bad at doing).

The only surprise was the recommendation to use Hungarian notation. I find it amusing that people get so hung up on Hungarian notation (I happen to like it but would not miss it if I never used it again). It's just a way to try to making code more readable when using local variables. If you think it gets in the way, then you shouldn't use it. Other than that confusing suggestion (MS says don't use Hungarian but you ARE free to use or not to use whatever convention you like) the book is flawless.

This is a book that every team doing VB.NET development should discuss if not follow. Standards are important, most of the software building cycle is in testing, debugging and modifying existing code. His standards are something to draw on as we come up with the best practices for our particular solutions.