Visual Basic 2005

How This Book Is Organized

This book is meant to be read as a series of articles, but it can easily be used as a reference or read straight through. I recommend reading it at your com­puter, with Visual Studio running.
Each part is designed to teach you something that you need to know. The only part that I strongly suggest you read, however, is Part I, “Getting to Know .NET Using VB.” After that, you can read whatever you need to get the job done, or read the whole book all the way through — it is up to you.

Part I: Getting to Know .NET Using VB

After a quick jumpstart, I discuss the tools and concepts in this part. Chapter 1 is a Hello World introduction to the language, which experienced VB program­mers will find useful and new programmers will find vital. Chapter 2 is a tour of the development tool you will be using, Visual Studio 2005.

Chapter 3 is arguably the most important chapter in the book. It is about designing good software with Visual Basic. You may want to read that one twice. I wanted to print it twice, but the publisher wouldn’t let me.

Part II: Building Applications with VB 2005

This part gets you started programming; you’ll find one chapter here for each of the four most used project types (Windows and Web Forms, DLL files, and XML Web services), and then a chapter discussing how to debug all of them.

Part III: Making Your Programs Work

This part is actually about Visual Basic, the language. You see, the projects discussed in Part II are actually available to lots of languages. You can write a Windows Forms project in Java (Microsoft calls it J#) if you want to. The actual VB language doesn’t kick in until you write a program that needs more than the visual design.

Part IV: Digging into the Framework

Finally, in Part IV, you look at the last part of the puzzle — what the .NET Framework can do for you. Tons of tools that are built right in to the frame­work are available to all languages, but have a special twist when used with Visual Basic.

I begin with the important stuff, specifically security. Then I cover data, files, networks, and drawing. Throughout all these chapters, I provide code exam­ples that will help you through the tougher problems that you may encounter in your VB career.

Part V: The Part of Tens

Some things fit nowhere. That’s what the Part of Tens is for — in this part, I collected the most useful tips that didn’t fit elsewhere and made them into top ten lists.
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