What Is This Book About?

What Is This Book About?

Many articles have appeared in the press about Visual Basic .NET being radically different from prior versions of Visual Basic. Unfortunately, most of the articles leave you with more questions than answers. What exactly are the changes in Visual Basic .NET? Will it be possible to upgrade existing applications? Why does it break compatibility with Visual Basic 6? Visual Basic .NET includes an Upgrade Wizard, which upgrades up to 95 percent of your project s code, but what about the other 5 percent? What are the common upgrade issues? How do you resolve them and get your project working in Visual Basic .NET? What about XML Web services and ADO.NET data access how can existing programs take advantage of these new features?

In this book, we answer these questions and more. We provide a complete guide to upgrading, with both technical and conceptual information. To upgrade your applications, you will need to learn some new skills. We teach these skills and discuss the hows, whats, and whys of upgrading: how to recognize the micro-issues that need a one-line fix, what to do about macro-issues that involve redesign of your application, and why Microsoft made the changes to Visual Basic.

Along the way, we ll take a few interesting digressions. Because we worked on the team that created Visual Basic .NET, we ll share a few behind-the-scenes stories about Visual Basic and the development of Visual Basic .NET. These stories are scattered throughout this book, which is divided into four parts:

• Part I, Introduction to Upgrading What the differences are between Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic .NET, how to prepare projects for upgrading, what approach to use, and when to leave applications in Visual Basic 6

• Part II, Upgrading Applications How to use the Upgrade Wizard, what the wizard does and doesn t do, what errors the Upgrade Wizard generates, and how to interoperate with COM components from VB.NET

• Part III, Getting Your Project Working How to fix the common problems with forms, language, data access, MTS, and COM+ services; how to get your ActiveX controls and COM components to work; and how to deal with issues common to VB Application Wizard projects

• Part IV, Techniques for Adding Value How to redesign multi tiered applications to use .NET remoting or XML Web services, how to replace ActiveX controls with Windows Forms controls, how to integrate or replace ADO with ADO.NET

In addition to discussing how to upgrade applications, this book is also an upgrading reference. Chapter 8 includes the complete list of errors and warnings that the Upgrade Wizard generates. Chapter 19 maps the Microsoft Windows common controls to equivalent Windows Forms controls. Appendixes A and B give the complete Visual Basic function and object model mappings from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic .NET.