Hour 5. Understanding Visual Basic s Variables and Operators

Hour 5. Understanding Visual Basic's Variables and Operators

In this hour, we will cover

• What a programming language is

• What variables are and how to declare them

• How to assign values to variables

• What data types are and why they are important

• Visual Basic's operators and how to use them

• Typing rules

As discussed earlier, ASP.NET web pages are composed of two portions: an HTML portion, which contains HTML markup and Web controls; and a source code portion, which contains the ASP.NET web page's server-side source code. Using Visual Web Developer, you can write this source code section in one of two programming languages: Visual Basic or Visual C# (often referred to as just C#).

Most beginning developers find Visual Basic a much easier language to pick up than C#, mainly because Visual Basic's syntax and structure are much closer to everyday English than C#'s. Therefore, all of the source code portions of ASP.NET web pages discussed throughout this book use Visual Basic as the programming language.

If you are new to programming, you likely found the source code portions of the example in Hours 2 and 4 to be a bit daunting. Don't worry; in this hour and the next two, we'll take an in-depth look at Visual Basic. By the end of these three hours, you'll be able not only to make sense of source similar to that in previous hours, but also to write similar code on your own.

If you've had programming experience with Visual Basic for .NET in the past, you may need to just skim the contents of the next three hours because it is geared toward those who have had limited programming experience. If you have had experience with Visual Basic 6.0 or VBScriptversions of Visual Basic before Microsoft introduced the .NET FrameworkI encourage you to read these three hours because there have been some important changes in the syntax and semantics from Visual Basic 6.0 and VBScript.