Programming Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2005: The Language (Pro Developer) [Paperback]

Francesco Balena (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0735621837 | ISBN-13: 978-0735621831 | Publication Date: February 22, 2006 | Edition: 2nd

Get the essential, straightforward information you need to master the core capabilities of Visual Basic 2005. Focusing on the language and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 base class library, a well-known authority on Visual Basic provides both new and experienced developers the pragmatic guidance and examples they need to build innovative solutions.

Discover how to:

• Compress files, manipulate ACLs, use semaphores, and exploit other new capabilities in the .NET Framework 2.0
• Implement generics to define a type-safe data structure
• Use inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces, delegates, and attributes to write flexible applications
• Use the My namespace to perform common tasks more easily
• Work with the new editing and debugging features of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
• Master regular expressions and perform complex text searches and input validation
• Take advantage of streams, serialization, and threading techniques
• Implement advanced programming techniques based on custom attributes, reflection, and on-the-fly compilation
• Interact with legacy code by using PInvoke and COM Interop
• Understand key differences from Visual Basic 6.0Get code samples on the Web

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

This immensely popular book has been fully revised and updated for Visual Basic 2005, providing definitive, one-volume reference and instruction on the intricacies and uses of the language.

Key Book Benefits:

• Delves into the core, must-know topics for developers working with Visual Basic 2005, , and advances their mastery with essential skills

• Examines new features in Visual Basic, such as generics, code snippets, and My Namespace, in depth, while also providing the latest information on classic features such as classes and execution flow

• Provides hands-on code examples to illustrate concepts and build skills mastery

About the Author

Francesco Balena is the author of many Microsoft Press® books, including Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C# Developers. He is a trainer and consultant with Wintellect, an MSDN® Regional Director for Italy, and a regular speaker at US and European conferences.

Product Details

• Paperback: 990 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 2nd edition (February 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735621837
• ISBN-13: 978-0735621831
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #787,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

79 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The book delivers what it promises. And it's not "Step-by-Step", February 10, 2006

By 

Jazzwall "Jazz" (California, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Programming Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2005: The Language (Pro Developer) (Paperback)

There haven't been many good books that take Visual Basic .NET seriously as a full-featured Object Oriented Programming language for the .NET platform. Every other book on VB .NET is nothing but screenshot after screenshot of "drag-and-drop" development using Visual Studio.

Programming with the .NET framework encompasses a huge spectrum of things to learn. VB .NET the language, Visual Studio IDE, ASP .NET , ADO .NET, Windows Forms, Windows Services, Serviced Components and Interop are some of those things. After trying many VB books out there, I can confidently say that covering the entire breadth of topics makes a book shallow.

This book picks a select few of the above-mentioned topics and drills very deep into them. It focuses on the language constructs and shows us better programming techniques. Going through a few chapters, I've already learned many ways to write better code.

I'm glad this book doesn't spend a few hundred pages on ADO.NET and ASP.NET (there are some very good books that cover those topics... see below). Doing so would have taken space away from the valuable (and rare) content on the language itself.

This book won't show you how to create a drag-and-drop Windows/Web app. What it will do is make you a much better programmer.

Here's a list of some of the best books for VB Developers currently for sale:

- For Database Programming: Pro ADO.NET 2.0 (Sahil Malik; Apress)

- For ASP.NET Web Development: Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference (Dino Esposito; MS Press)

- Best-practices for .NET: Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic and Microsoft Visual C# Developers (Francesco Balena, Giuseppe Dimauro; MS Press)

- Good overall crash-course to get things started: Programming Visual Basic 2005 (Jesse Liberty; O'Reilly)

And of course, to master the most fundamental thing of all, the language itself, I recommend this book.

67 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Author provides details on "Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005: The Language", February 9, 2006

By 

Francesco Balena - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Programming Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2005: The Language (Pro Developer) (Paperback)

I am writing a "review" of my own book to ensure that potential buyers know exactly what the book contains, how it is structured, and why.

First and foremost, this book does **NOT** cover all the topics that its 2002 and 2003 editions do. Most notably, it doesn't cover Windows Forms, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, plus other advanced topics such as serviced components, and security.

The point is, there are so many new things in the .NET Framework 2.0 and a single book can't cover them with the necessary level of detail. If I had squeezed all these topics in a 1400-page book (which is the largest book my publisher would allow me to write), the result wouldn't be satisfactory anyway. If you are interested in these high-level topics, you should purchase a book with a narrower focus, for example the excellent "Programming ASP.NET" by Dino Esposito.

After a lot of hard thinking, I decided to focus solely on important topics that, in my opinion, very few books cover adequately, namely the Visual Basic 2005 language and the most important base classes in the .NET Framework 2.0: basic data types, arrays and collections, resources, files and streams, object serialization, threading, PInvoke and COM interop.

After I took the decision, I had to face the problem of choosing the best title for the new edition. Some portions of this book are taken from its previous editions, therefore the title should have been close enough to make the relation clear. At the same time, the title should have been different enough to emphasize that it isn't a new edition the **same** book. In the end, I opted for appending "The Language" to the original title, hoping that this difference was apparent enough as to have readers of previous edition look more closely at its Table of Contents and understand that some chapters were missing.

The new edition covers in all the new features of the language a very detailed manner, including generics, the My Namespace, unsigned integers, partial classes, operator overloading, and custom events.

But this book is more than just a reference book; rather, it is about **programming techniques** that you can implement with Visual Basic 2005 and base classes in the .NET Framework 2.0. For example, I devote an entire chapter to explain how reflection can be useful to solve recurring programming problems in a very elegant manner, whereas another chapter describes how you can custom attributes to implement plug-ins for Windows Forms application and n-tier, data-centric applications. The chapter on regular expressions shows how you can use this under-utilized .NET feature to parse html files, read comma-delimited and fixed-length data files, perform quite sophisticated input data validation, and more.

Finally, it makes little sense to focus on the language and know nothing about the IDE, and for this reason the book devotes over 110 pages to improving productivity by means of the old and new features of Visual Studio, such as macros, code snippets, tracepoints, unit testing, code coverage, code analysis, and more.

You can read more about this book, including the complete Table of Contents and a couple sample chapters, on my blog hosted by the dotnet2themax web site.

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Improved Language, Platform and Balena is the Master, February 11, 2006

By 

John Grove (Malibu, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Programming Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2005: The Language (Pro Developer) (Paperback)

I have had Balena's book since Visual Basic 6.0, then his Programming Visual Basic.NET, then I got his 2003 edition of the book.

I really like the fact that he separated the important topic of "The Language" as he did it this time. You can find books on ADO.NET elsewhere and that's how it should be because these topics can be quite vast in itself. So I find the approach he took is more helpful.

The improved platform of Visual Studio is remarkable in my opinion and it seems I can get more done now with less code than ever before on some features.

A quick note:
When I first started reading Balena's first book on .NET, I was completely lost. And he even suggested it was not for "beginners", but if you persevere, you will slowly begin to comprehend what .NET is all about. It takes time..But as you learn the concepts, Balena's books becomes all the more clear. So hang in there...And if you are searching for help in understanding what .NET is about, you have certainly come to the right book.

Hope this review helps -