Why Read This Chapter

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that all the other .NET languages do—so under the hood, there is no longer any distinction to be made between the two linguistic cultures. It's just on the surface, where we programmers work, that the differences reside.

OOP itself, like biology, involves a complex system of classification. This means that people using OOP must spend a good amount of their time performing clerical duties (Where does this go? How do I describe this? What category is this in? Are the text-manipulation functions located in the Text namespace, or the String namespace? Does this object have to be instantiated, or can I just use its methods directly without creating the object first?)

If you're one of the millions of VB programmers who, like me, came upon VB.NET with the highly intelligent reaction ''Whaaaaa??!!," this chapter might be of use to you.

I'm not unintelligent, and I'm assuming you're not either. But slogging through the VB.NET world makes one seem rather slow, especially at first. This chapter gives you some hard-won advice that can save you considerable confusion.

VB.NET is, of course, far easier to navigate if you have a background in C programming languages (and its lovely wife, object-oriented programming).

Millions of VB programmers deliberately decided not to use C. That's why we became VB programmers in the first place. We preferred the power of VB's rapid application development tools. We didn't care for the reverse-Polish backward syntax, the redundant punctuation (all those semicolons) and other aspects of C and its daughter languages.

The Internet changed all that—we must develop new skills and adapt to new programming styles. Leaving the cozy and predictable world of local programming (applications for Windows, running on a single computer) requires new techniques. You don't have to switch to C or its ilk, but you do have to expand your VB vocabulary and skills.

Today's programs are sometimes fractured into multiple programlets (distributed applications) residing in different locations on different hard drives and sometimes even using different platforms or languages. Web Services are the wave of the future, and this kind of computing greatly increases the impact of communication and security issues. Not to mention the necessity of encapsulating code into objects.

So gird your loins or whatever else you gird when threatened, and get ready for some new ideas. You've got to deal with some different notions.

Each of us (the authors) has written several books on VB.NET in the past few years —working within the .NET world daily for three years now—and we're still discovering new tools, concepts, and features. Part of this is simply getting to know the huge .NET Framework, and part of it is adjusting to OOP and other C-like elements that are now part of VB.

What they say of quantum mechanics applies to OOP: only ten people in the world understand it well, and nobody understands it completely. So be brave. You can learn some patterns and rules to help you get results in .NET, and the benefit is that VB.NET is quite a bit more powerful and flexible than traditional VB. There are considerable rewards for your patience and efforts.

You'll find ideas in this chapter that will deepen your understanding of the great, vast .NET environment and framework. You'll find useful information here that will improve your VB.NET programming—guaranteed. For example: What are structures, and when should you use them? (They're

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