Microsoft Visual Basic .NET provides the productivity features developers need to rapidly create enterprise-critical Web applications. In "Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform", Andrew Troelsen shows experienced developers how to use VB .NET for developing virtually every possible kind of .NET application. From Windows-based to Web-based applications, and from ADO .NET to XML Web services, it's all here. There are detailed discussions of every aspect of .NET development and many useful examples with no toy code (TM). Troelsen starts with a brief philosopohy of the VB .NET language, and then quickly moves to key technical and architectural issues for .NET developers. Not only is there extensive coverage of the .NET Framework, but Troelsen also describes the new object-oriented features of VB .NET, including inheritance and interface-based programming techniques. Readers also learn how to use VB .NET for object serialization, how to access data with ADO .NET, how to build (and interact with) .NET Web services, and how to access legacy COM applications. Written in the same five-star style as his previous two books, "Developer's Workshop to COM and ATL 3.0" and "C# and the .N ET Platform", this is the comprehensive book on using VB .NET to build .NET applications that developers have been waiting for!
Aimed at the more experienced programmer tackling the new VB.NET for the first time, Andrew Troelsen's
Visual Basic.NET and the .NET Platform provides a quick-moving and intelligently rendered tour of .NET with plenty of in-depth material on classes and object-oriented design.
The notable feature of this book is that is a direct "translation" of the author's C# book, C# and the.NET Platform using the same chapters and many of examples ported from C# to VB.NET. Readers can thus rest assured that this is tried-and-true material.
The author pitches the presentation at a fairly expert level with plenty of coverage of object-oriented design, as well as a pretty thorough language tutorial. (The fact that it's possible to show VB.NET using the same features as C# shows the languages are now equals on .NET.) Troelson's tour delivers good insight into the.NET Framework itself with coverage of topics like Intermediate Language (IL), the Common Language Runtime (CLR), as well as deploying .NET components in assemblies. The book shows the "three pillars" of object-oriented programming--encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism--which are amply illustrated with code excerpts using objects for shapes, employee and other simple classes. This book is also good at demonstrating how to get older COM and COM+ code to interoperate with new .NET components.
Later chapters turn toward building user interfaces, whether through traditional clients using Windows Forms (and graphics programming), but also a solid introduction to ASP.NET and Web Forms, for building Web-based, thin clients. Final sections look at Web services, which are just as easy to create in VB.NET as with any other supported .NET language.
While this book assumes some programming knowledge on the part of the reader, it covers all the bases needed to use the new VB.NET and the .NET Framework effectively. It's a worthy choice for getting onboard with .NET and will be appreciated by any new VB.NET developer, as well as C# and VB 6 developers making the transition to Microsoft's latest version. --Richard Dragan
