Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform: An Advanced Guide [Paperback]

Andrew Troelsen (Author)

Book Description

Series: Intertech Instructor Series | Publication Date: November 15, 2001

Microsoft Visual Basic .NET provides the productivity features developers need to rapidly create enterprise-critical web applications. In Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform: An Advanced Guide, author Andrew Troelsen shows experienced developers how to use VB .NET for developing virtually every possible kind of .NET application. From Windows-based to web-based applications, ADO .NET, XML Web services, and object-oriented language features, it's all here. There are detailed discussions of every aspect of .NET development and useful examples with no toy code.

Troelsen starts with a brief philosophy of the VB .NET language and then quickly moves to key technical and architectural issues for .NET developers. Not only is there extensive coverage of the .NET Framework, but Troelsen also describes the object-oriented features of VB .NET including inheritance and interface-based programming techniques. Youll also learn how to use VB .NET for object serialization, how to access data with ADO.NET, and how to build (and interact with) .NET Web Services, and how to access legacy COM applications.

Written in the same five-star style as Troelson's previous two books, Developer's Workshop to COM and ATL 3.0 and C# and the .NET Platform, this is the comprehensive book on using VB .NET to build .NET applications that you've been waiting for!

Learn from the author! Check out Andrew's workshop schedule at http://www.intertech-inc.com/courses/CourseDetails.asp?ID=99075&LOC.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Aimed at the more experienced programmer tackling the new VB .NET for the first time, Andrew Troelsen's Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform provides a quick-moving and intelligently rendered tour of .NET, with plenty of in-depth material on classes and object-oriented design.

Notably, this book is a direct translation of the author's C# book, C# and the .NET Platform, using the same chapters and many examples ported from C# to VB .NET. Readers can thus rest assured that this is tried-and-true material.

The author pitches the presentation at a fairly expert level, with plenty of coverage of object-oriented design, as well as a pretty thorough language tutorial. (The fact that it's possible to show VB .NET using the same features as C# demonstrates that the languages are now equals on .NET.) Troelson's tour offers good insight into the .NET Framework itself, with coverage of topics like Intermediate Language (IL), the Common Language Runtime (CLR), as well as deploying .NET components in assemblies. The book shows the three pillars of object-oriented programming--encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism--which are amply illustrated with code excerpts using objects for shapes, employee, and other simple classes. This book is also good at demonstrating how to get older COM and COM+ code to interoperate with new .NET components.

Later chapters turn toward building user interfaces, whether through traditional clients using Windows Forms (and graphics programming), or using ASP.NET and Web Forms (for which the authors supply a solid introduction) for building Web-based, thin clients. Final sections look at Web services, which are just as easy to create in VB .NET as with any other supported .NET language.

While this book assumes some programming knowledge on the part of the reader, it covers all the bases needed to use the new VB .NET and the .NET Framework effectively. It's a worthy choice for getting onboard with .NET and will be appreciated by any new VB .NET developer, as well as C# and VB6 developers making the transition to Microsoft's latest version. --Richard Dragan

From the Publisher

Another great title in the Apress and Intertech-Inc Instructor Series.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 1200 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (November 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893115267
• ISBN-13: 978-1893115262
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,299,248 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Key practical resource for the hard-core VB developer, November 26, 2001

By 

Eric Lynn (Villa Ridge, MO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform: An Advanced Guide (Paperback)

If you are tired of worthless first-peek .NET books, this is the one to buy. I found the content to be excellent and the format good for picking and choosing what I needed. I particularly like Mr. Troelsen's approach of doing code by hand first before going through the VS.NET wizards.

Some of the single-chapter intros to .NET technologies were better than entire books I've read on the subject (quite a feat!).

This is a great practical companion to Dan Appleman's "Moving to VB.NET" which does a great job providing the theory behind .NET in general and VB.NET specifically.

Let's hope Mr. Troelson writes some follow-up books on the subjects he dealt with in one chapter in this book (may I suggest GDI+).

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simpler explanations help, March 3, 2002

By 

Richard Morgan (Columbus, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform: An Advanced Guide (Paperback)

Being a VB6 programmer, I was looking for a good book to introduce VB.NET. After reading Cornell and Morrison's "Programming VB .NET: A Guide for Experienced Programmers" and Appleman's "Moving to VB .NET: Strategies, Concepts, and Code", I think Troelsen does a better job.

The two previous books are excellent with insight and tips on how VB has changed in VB.NET. (And yes, it's almost a new language.) Yet Troelsen takes the time to illustrate the concepts with very basic code and examples including output. Cornell/Morrison and Appleman have code examples too, but I felt they were cramped for space in their books. Thus, they left out some minor explanations that may make you say, "Aha!" Because of the sheer size of this book, it has plenty of fascinating details to programming with .NET.

By the way, the sample code for all these books are available on-line which is really helpful when it comes to investigating how things work in depth.

Something that stands out is that Troelsen starts with explaining the .NET Platform in detail enough to understand why VB.NET behaves as it does. For example, strings are immutable. Each of these books stresses and illustrates what this means, but Troelsen is the only one that clearly defines why.

Troelsen also writes clearly and concisely; his book is part teaching and part reference. For advanced programmers, perhaps Appleman would be a better choice as he jumps into complex topics and illustrates them with bare-bones examples (as an aside, Appleman is a very colorful writer and he tries hard to make reading enjoyable). For the rest of us with some programming experience, Troelsen goes that extra step to make it easier to understand. For the completely new programmer? While Troelsen does spend some time on the basics, I think some solid understanding of OOP and some VB6 exposure are really required.

Good luck with .NET everyone!

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars VB.NET to the MAX ?, January 22, 2002

By 

Gerben Rampaart (Roosendaal, Noord-Brabant Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform: An Advanced Guide (Paperback)

Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform is a big (and I mean BIG) book that tries to make everything clear to you that has anything or everything to do with Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform. This is exactly why I do not give the book 5 stars, because sometimes you get the idea that the writer is drowning in subjects. Andrew Troelsen (who has a nice comfortable and knowledge writing style by the way) wants to include it all but there is simply too much.

That was the only downside I ran into I must say. 4 stars is still a very good score and surely not without a reason. As mentioned before Andrew Troelsen knows in extreem detail what he is talking about and I would dare to rate him in the Appleman class. Just as Appleman often does, Andrew Troelsen throws in personal opinions about language and Framework aspects, which sounds scary, but this is just what you need when you are trying to learn a brand new Language. (Off-Topic: Yes, I said NEW language, you can just forget about comparing VB.NET to VB 6.0, it is no equal matchup in any way whatsoever). In pretty much all aspects a very good book. I enjoyed reading it very much.

A tiny warning is in order; Please do NOT buy this book if you are planning to 'get-up-to-date' with the technical capabillities of VB.NET and nothing more than that, as is often done by IT managers (no deep knowledge required for them, just an overview). This book will be completely wasted on you. Why ? Because it holds over a 1000 pages of the most detailed info you can get about VB.NET and the Framework. This books requires hours and hours of reading and practicing. The book will create a VB.NET Programmer, not somebody that 'knows something about it'. Get ready to do a load of work ... and get a load of knowledge back.