Chapter 02 : Using Visual Basic .NET with Visual Studio .NET

Overview

This chapter will get you started with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. Microsoft Access developers creating solutions with Visual Basic .NET will find Visual Studio .NET a convenient and powerful IDE. This chapter presents a progression of topics designed to make Access developers productive with Visual Basic .NET as soon as possible. The first section introduces Visual Studio .NET. After describing how to configure Visual Studio .NET for Visual Basic .NET and presenting a brief introduction to the IDE, the chapter switches its focus to template types for building projects. While the chapter gives an overview of all 11 Visual Basic .NET project templates for starting a project, it provides demonstrations only for Windows Application and Class Library projects. Windows Application projects will be important for most Access developers because this type is most similar to the ones Access developers commonly build with Microsoft Visual Basic and VBA. The Class Library project is important because Visual Basic .NET is so object oriented.

The chapter s next -to-last section selectively addresses what s new and different about Visual Basic .NET vs. Visual Basic and VBA. In spite of the complaints of some developers, I found the differences well worth the effort of learning because of the increased capabilities available from Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Framework. You ll have to make the decision for yourself about learning Visual Basic .NET, but the coverage of what s new and different will help you to make an informed decision. Chapters 3 and 4 convey a sense of Visual Basic .NET programming techniques while drilling down more thoroughly on what s new and different about Visual Basic .NET.

This chapter closes with an example, named Jump Start, of creating a Visual Basic .NET solution for the Shippers table in the Northwind database. The sample pulls together conceptual ADO.NET elements from Chapter 1 with the hands-on demonstrations of initiating and populating a Windows Application project with Visual Studio .NET from this chapter. One interesting feature of the example is that it takes just one line of code to build the application. The Jump Start example, along with the other projects mentioned throughout the chapter, are available in folders for running from Visual Studio .NET.

My goal in this chapter, as with the whole book, is to prepare you to create database solutions for Access data files (mdb) with Visual Basic .NET. I ll begin by discussing the relationships between the two technologies.

Note  

You can view and run the samples described throughout this book by looking at the solutions included with this book s sample files. In most cases, simply open the .sln file in the root directory within each folder to load the corresponding project into Visual Studio .NET. For the sample projects in this chapter, you may find it more instructive to create the projects from scratch than to load the folders from the .sln file because one of the major goals of the chapter is to get you comfortable creating Visual Basic .NET projects. Whether you use the sample projects available for this chapter or re-create your own versions of them, you can run the projects by invoking the .exe file in the bin subdirectory of a project s folder. If a project has a .dll file instead of an .exe file in its bin subdirectory, invoke the .exe file from the folder of a project that references the project with the .dll file.