Section 19.2. Advanced Topics in VB.NET

19.2 Advanced Topics in VB.NET

If you decide that you want to understand all the nooks and crannies of VB.NET before going on to creating applications, you might consider reading a more advanced guide or a reference work on the language.

O'Reilly offers a few choices: Programming Visual Basic .NET is a more advanced book I am writing for release in early 2003, and VB.NET in a Nutshell , by Steven Roman, Ron Petrusha, and Paul Lomax is a comprehensive reference work. O'Reilly also has VB.NET Core Classes (title?) in a Nutshell by Budi Kurniawan and Ted Neward.

The difference between Programming Visual Basic .NET and Learning Visual Basic .NET is that the former book is written for the advanced VB6 programmer, and so does not spend as much time on the fundamentals. In exchange, this somewhat longer book does go into more detail and actually gets into the process of developing applications for the .NET platform.

You'll find that all of the material covered in Learning Visual Basic .NET is also covered in the first chapters of Programming Visual Basic .NET . You may want to skim these chapters anyway, both for review and because some advanced topics do appear in these early chapters.

The next four chapters of Programming Visual Basic .NET provide an overview of both ASP.NET and Windows Forms, as well as ADO.NET. ASP.NET is used for programming web applications and web services, while the Windows Forms technology is used to program Windows applications. ADO.NET is the .NET technology for interacting with databases.

The final part of Programming Visual Basic .NET covers advanced topics in .NET programming such as assemblies, versioning, attributes and reflection, marshaling and remoting, threads and synchronization, streams, and interoperating with COM.

Assemblies are the basic unit of compilation. The chapter on assemblies and versioning addresses issues that arise when you create large commercial applications. You'll find information about private and shared assemblies, as well as an overview of how you manage the release of multiple versions of your program.

Attributes are metadata; data about your program. Learning Visual Basic .NET doesn't cover attributes because this is an advanced topic. However, attributes and custom attributes allow you to control how your program is processed by the tools available in .NET. Reflection is the process of a program examining itself (or another program) and allows you to discover, at runtime, the methods and properties of an object that was not known at compile time.

Threads are created when you want a program to do two things at once. When you have more than one thread operating in your program, you must control synchronization: making sure that access to your data is mediated so that one thread does not corrupt the data created in a second thread. The chapter on threading teaches you how to take control of this powerful aspect of .NET and create programs that are highly efficient.

Marshaling is the process of sending an object from one process or computer to another. This allows you to share objects across program boundaries. Remoting is the process of calling a method in a different program. These very advanced topics allow you to build highly distributed programs.

Streams allow you to read and write data both from a file and across the network. The .NET Framework provides extensive stream support, including support for reading and writing data across the standard web protocols such as HTTP.

Finally, many companies have extensive libraries of objects created in COM, the earlier Microsoft technology for building classes and controls. The chapter on COM in Programming Visual Basic .NET teaches you how to import these controls and DLL files into your .NET application (or export .NET controls to COM) to preserve your investment.

If you decide that you want to develop expertise in integrating COM with .NET, take a look at Adam Nathan's .NET and Com (Sams). I can't think of a more definitive book on this difficult topic.

If you want to go beyond the basics of .NET programming, and get deep into the internals, there is no better book than Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming in Microsoft Visual Basic .NET , by Jeffrey Richter and Francesco Belena (Microsoft Press, 2002). Richter and Belena are phenomenal writers, and their chapter on delegates alone is worth the cost of the book.

Another key topic in .NET programming is security. For the definitive word on .NET security, you'll want to buy .NET Framework Security , by LaMacchia et al (Addison-Wesley).