Preface

This is not your typical Visual Basic book.

This is not a reference book. This is not a primer on the language. This is not a book of white papers hyping .NET.

The goal of this book is to make you immediately productive, creating Windows and Web applications using Visual Basic and its associated tools.

By creating applications, you will learn Visual Basic as it has evolved for .NET. You'll see how to use the tools effectively, and you'll learn the details of building robust object-oriented applications.

The focus of this book is on building Windows applications and building Web applications (including Web Services). In a sense, this is really two books in one. The first book could have been called Building Windows Applications with Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2005, and the second Building Web Applications And Web Services with Visual Basic and Visual Studio 2005. By putting them in a single volume, we can combine all the supplemental and background material, and give you more bang for your buck.

If you only want to build web applications, skip right to Part II. Don't worry, you'll be fine, and you can always come back to Part I when you need to build a Windows application.