Professional VB.NET, 2nd Edition (Paperback)

~ Fred Barwell (Author), Richard Blair (Author), Jonathan Crossland (Author), Richard Case (Author), Bill Forgey (Author), Whitney Hankison (Author), Billy S. Hollis (Author), Rockford Lhotka (Author), (Author), John C. Roth (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Written and tested for the final release of .NET v1.0, this book explains the underlying philosophy and design of the .NET Framework and Common Language Runtime, and details the differences between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET.

VB.NET is covered virtually from start to finish: beginning with an overview of the .NET Framework, and ending with best practices for deploying .NET applications. In between, everything from database access to integration with other technologies such as XML is covered. Each of these new features are investigated in detail. You will see that VB.NET has emerged as a powerful yet easy to use language that allows developers to target the Internet just as easily as the desktop.

You will learn how to:

- Develop applications and components using Visual Studio .NET

- Effectively apply inheritance and interfaces when designing objects and components

- Organize your code using namespaces

- Handle errors using the Try...Catch...Finally structure

- Access data using ADO.NET and bind controls to the underlying data sources

- Create Windows applications and custom Windows controls

- Interoperate with COM and ActiveX components

- Create transactional and queuing components

- Use .NET Remoting to exchange serialized objects between clients and servers

- Create Windows Services

- Use Visual Basic .NET to access information on the Web

- Create and consume Web Services

- Secure your applications and code using the tools provided in the .NET Framework SDK

- Arrange your applications and libraries in assemblies and deploy them using Visual Studio .NET

From the Publisher

This book is primarily aimed at experienced Visual Basic developers who are looking for an introduction to Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Framework.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 1012 pages
• Publisher: Wrox Press; 2nd edition (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861007167
• ISBN-13: 978-1861007162
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #881,383 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent guide for experienced visual basic programmers, May 7, 2002

By	Robert T Darbinson (New Orleans, USA) - See all my reviews

As someone who has spent over five years as a professional Visual Basic programmer I don't want to throw away all my knowledge when I move to VB.NET. Fortunately, this (big) book doesn't bother teaching you programming from scratch (you should definitely look elsewhere if you're a complete beginner) but will help you make sense of not only what's changed in the move from VB6 to VB.NET (a lot!) but also what you can take with you from VB6 (a surprisingly large amount actually). This means that you don't have to spend your time working through stuff like "this is a variable", "this is an if statement". Instead the book gets stuck into what makes the .NET Framework and Common Language Runtime tick - and explains how you can relate all of it to VB6.

The first third of the book serves as a reference to the VB.NET language - syntax, error handling, objects, inheritance, interfaces, and the differences between variables and types. While this means that you don't get to create many exciting applications early on it does mean that you have a thorough grounding in the essentials of the language.

Then the rest of the book takes a look at the most important features of .NET in turn: ADO.NET, XML, Windows Forms, Web Services, Data Binding, Remoting, Networking, Threading, Security, Web Forms, etc. You won't be an expert in any of these areas after you've read the book but you will have a much better idea of what VB.NET is capable of and how to get started using the advanced features of the .NET Framework Class Library.

Although there are a lot of authors that wrote on this book, which can spell trouble in my experience, the editors have managed to maintain a consistent voice throughout and there's surprisingly little overlap between chapters. Well worth the money.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must for the experienced Visual Basic developer!, October 17, 2002

By	VisualBasicBooks.com (Canada) - See all my reviews

This book is for experienced developers who need to make the transition to VB.NET. It will also help programmers with previous knowledge of VB.NET who want to move up to the professional level.

The book begins with an introduction to the .NET Framework and common language RunTime(CLR). The CLR is responsible for managing the execution of code compiled for the .NET platform. The next few chapters focus on object oriented programming and how to derive classes from base classes using inheritance. Chapter 9 gives a detailed discussion on how error handling works in VB.NET by discussing the CLR exception handler in detail and the new Try...Catch...Finally structure. An entire chapter is devoted to multi-threading. You will learn how threads can be created, and the differences between multitasking and multi-threading. Chapter 16 discusses COM and .NET component interoperability, and the tools provided to help link the two technologies together. Chapter 18 gives detailed coverage of the ADO.NET data access technology. You will learn how to build flexible, fast, and scalable data access objects and applications.

The final chapters discuss building web applications with web forms, creating custom controls for Windows Forms and Web Forms, and finally, creating and consuming Web Services.

If you're an experienced VB developer and would like to make the transition to VB.NET, then this book is a must.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Full of useful information, May 17, 2002

By	Terence Black (Kettering, Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews

This is a huge book (just short of a thousand pages) and it's packed full of really useful information. It covers all the important parts of the .NET Framework Class Library - Win Forms, Web Forms, ADO.NET, XML, Web Services and more - as well as the syntax and new features of Visual Basic .NET.

With so much to cover the book has to keep up a decent pace, which means that the authors assume that you've got experience of working with Visual Basic 6. If you're new to programming then you'll want to look elsewhere.

For VB6 programmers this book is great value.