Copyright

Preface

For many years , Microsoft Visual Basic has been used as the ultimate rapid application development tool for Windows applications. Its ease of use revolutionized Windows programming, and successive generations of Visual Basic have progressively made it more powerful. VB6 can be used to implement complex multiple- tier applications using COM and COM+ components as well as traditional Windows desktop programs. But you could never quite do everything in Visual Basic that you could in a lower level language such as C++, and many projects would use a mixture of languages, with resulting complexity from interfacing between the diverse environments.

Microsoft's .NET brings a sea change to software development. The powerful Common Language Runtime and the vast .NET Framework class library provide a consistent software platform for all .NET programming languages. Visual Basic now enjoys virtually identical capabilities to other languages, including the new Visual C# and the ever-popular Visual C++, while preserving the basic ease of use and strong RAD features that have made Visual Basic so popular. The Common Language Specification and the Common Type System make interoperability between the different .NET languages almost seamless, while the power of each is such that for most projects you will probably never have to use a mixed language approach, unless other factors such as legacy code or programmer skill sets steer you in that direction.

There is substantial change to the Visual Basic language itself, and VB6 code will not run unmodified in the .NET environment. Also, the new version of the language, Visual Basic .NET, or just VB.NET, is now a fully object-oriented language with features such as interfaces, inheritance, and polymorphism. The result is that there is a definite learning curve when moving to VB.NET from VB6. And learning the new programming language is only part of the challenge. The much greater challenge is learning the .NET Framework and all its capabilities, including Windows Forms, ADO.NET, ASP.NET Web Forms, and Web services.

This book is written for the experienced programmer to help you quickly come up to speed on the VB.NET language and then go on to an in-depth study of the .NET Framework. It is a practical book for practicing professionals, and it has many examples and a realistic case study that continues through many of the chapters. The goal is to equip you to begin building significant applications using Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Framework.

The book is part of The Integrated .NET Series from Object Innovations and Prentice Hall PTR. Other books in the series provide a more a more basic introduction to VB.NET, discuss the issues of migrating to VB.NET, and cover other important .NET languages and topics in the Framework. See the front of this book for a list of titles in the series. This book, in substance and structure, is quite close to the companion titles Application Development Using C# and .NET and .NET Architecture and Programming Using Visual C++ . A major difference between those books and this, besides using VB.NET as the language, is extensive coverage of GUI programming, including three chapters on Windows Forms and a chapter on GDI+.