What You Need to Use This Book

To get the most out of this book, you'll need either Visual Studio (with Visual Basic) or Visual Basic Express.

You'll also need some sort of database software. Best bet is either SQL Server or SQL Server Express. You can get away with using Microsoft Access in a pinch . Anything else and you're on your own.

That's all you need.

I suggest typing in the code, but you are free to download all of the examples from my web site, http://www.LibertyAssociates.com (click on Books), where you'll also find an errata (with, I hope, very few entries), a FAQ, and a link to my private support discussion group .

If you find an error that isn't already listed in the errata, please send it to me at jliberty@LibertyAssociates.com. If you have a question about a topic in this book, please post it in the discussion group, under this book's folder, and make sure you tell me which edition you were reading, what page or example you were looking at, what you did, what you expected, and what you got.

What I Threw Away

Chapter 1 was going to be an introduction to Visual Basic and an explanation of how it fits into the .NET world. But that would be a waste of time. You'll see how things fit together when you start creating applications. I threw it away.

Chapter 2 was going to be devoted to writing your first "Hello World" program. Another waste of time. I threw that away too. ^[*]

^[*] There, isn't that better? We haven't even begun, and I've already saved 100 pages. At this rate, you'll finish reading this book before you pay for it. Oops. Go pay for it. I'll wait.... Got your receipt? Good. Then we're ready.

Let's get started building something useful.

How This Book Is Organized

Part I: Building Windows Applications

Chapter 1, Design and First Forms: Get right to work creating Windows Applications using drag and drop in Visual Studio 2005. Understand how to respond to events to build interactive applications.
Chapter 2, Data Access: Most meaningful applications interact with a database. This chapter shows you how to use drag-and-drop controls to create that connectivity, how to query with parameters, and how to build master/detail pages
Chapter 3, Cool Controls: Go beyond the standard form controls to enhance your Windows application with built-in browser controls, masked text boxes, and sophisticated tree controls.
Chapter 4, Custom Controls: When the controls that Microsoft provides are not quite enough, you are free to create your own by modifying an existing control, combining two or more existing controls, or creating an entirely new control from scratch
Chapter 5, GDI+ and Drawing: When you need to take absolute control of what is drawn on your form, turn to GDI+ and the techniques shown here to draw dynamic applications.
Chapter 6, Mice and Fonts: Learn how to detect mouse events and respond to them. While you're at it, explore the use of fonts to enhance the presentation of your application.
Chapter 7, Integrating Legacy COM Controls: Many Windows Forms applications will interact with legacy COM controls. This chapter shows you how to do so in a managed environment.

Part II: Building Web Applications

Chapter 8, Web Application, Design, and First Forms: Visual Basic 2005 and Visual Studio make a powerful combination for creating sophisticated web applications. The same drag-and-drop technology you used to create Windows applications can be used to create complex and sophisticated Windows applications.
Chapter 9, Validation Controls: Validating the user 's input to ensure that fields are filled, that values are appropriate, that passwords match, and so forth was tedious job for many web programmers. This chapter shows you the library of controls created for you to greatly simplify these tasks .
Chapter 10, Master Pages and Navigation: Providing a unified look and feel for your site is made much easier though the innovation of Master Pages. A second requirement for modern web applications is to provide "bread crumbs" to show the user how she arrived at the current page and to provide a site map to show the user how to get to the page he wants. This chapter walks you through the controls that make this a very easy task.
Chapter 11, Web Data Access: As with Windows applications, most meaningful web applications need to interact with data. We'll show you how to do so with a single control, and how to update the database and manage multiuser applications.
Chapter 12, Personalization: Creating forms-based security is now a matter of dragging and dropping controls onto the form and hooking them into a database provided for you by .NET. Once your user is validated and assigned a role, it is easy to remember your user's preferences. With just a few controls, you can allow your user to customize not only the look and feel of your pages, but also which data is presented and at what part of the page.
Chapter 13, Custom Controls: When the web controls provided by Microsoft are not quite enough to accomplish your task, you are free to create your own by modifying an existing control, combining two or more existing controls, or creating an entirely new control from scratch. You can also extract part of an existing web page and use it repeatedly throughout your application by creating a user control.
Chapter 14, Web Services: Web services allow applications to interact with one another using the standard protocols of the Web. This chapter will show you how to create web services and also how to create applications that use web services.

Part III: Working with Visual Basic 2005

Chapter 15, Visual Studio 2005: Visual Studio 2005 is a highly sophisticated tool that will greatly enhance your productivity. This chapter will take you into some of the nooks and crannies of this tool.
Chapter 16, Visual Basic 2005 Fundamentals: The premise of this book is that you know most of the language from working with previous versions of VB6. If you are new to the language, however, or if you run into syntax that you find confusing, this chapter will provide a review of the language in detail.
Chapter 17, Using Collections and Generics: Collection classes are now type safe in Visual Basic 2005, and this chapter will show you how to use the new "Generic" collections to create type-safe stacks, queues, and dictionaries.
Chapter 18, Object-Oriented Visual Basic 2005: If you work your way through the exercises in this book, you'll be living and breathing object-oriented programming. This chapter provides a slightly more formal overview.