Summary

By now, I hope you've come to the same conclusion I have, which is that Visual Basic .NET is not nearly as different as it looks. The few things that appear truly strange are not really very important; the use of events, when it's necessary, can be reduced to a six-step cookie- cutter procedure; property procedures practically write themselves , and do the same thing as FoxPro properties do; and the additional effort get to your data can be relegated to a data access layer class that does the same thing FoxPro does, so that you don't ever have to think about it.

In Chapter 2 we'll build a FoxPro application using form classes and a data access class, permitting us to switch between DBFs and SQL Server as the data store. This application will serve as a model for developing your first Visual Basic .NET application in Chapter 3, using very similar coding. Then in Chapter 4 we'll compare data access to tables, SQL Server, and XML Web Services, in preparation for upgrading our applications to work with any of the three types of data stores.