Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Platform: An Advanced Guide

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Editorial Review:

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: An Advanced Guide, author 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, ADO .NET, XML Web services, and object-oriented language features, it's all here. There are detailed discussions of every aspect of .NET development and useful examples with no toy code™.

Troelsen starts with a brief philosophy 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. You'll also learn how to use VB .NET for object serialization, how to access data with ADO.NET, and how to build (and interact with) .NET Web Services, and how to access legacy COM applications.

Written in the same five-star style as Troelson's previous two books, Developer's Workshop to COM and ATL 3.0 and C# and the .NET Platform, this is the comprehensive book on using VB .NET to build .NET applications that you've been waiting for!

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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.

Notably, this book is a direct translation of the author's C# book, C# and the .NET Platform, using the same chapters and many 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# demonstrates that the languages are now equals on .NET.) Troelson's tour offers 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), or using ASP.NET and Web Forms (for which the authors supply a solid introduction) 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 VB6 developers making the transition to Microsoft's latest version. --Richard Dragan

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

not for me .:

examples are not great.
they need to be more practical.
book seems to be written for people with COM experience.
lingo used throughout the book assumes you have been "OOP-ing" in another language.
C++ coders wanting to transition to VB.NET would appreciate this book.

Good overall coverage but needs more detailed info:

This is a good book for the intermediate-to-advanced programmers making the switch to Visual Basic.Net from Visual Basic 6. Please NOTE: This is not a beginner book. The book provides a good overall coverage of most of the Visual Basic.Net topics but this book needs to be augmented with books that are more specific to the programming needs of the developer. For example, if the developer is going to develop Web forms in ASP.NET using Visual Basic.Net, they should buy a books that specifically written for... more info

Great OO coverage but is missing some critical topics:

Overall, I think the book does a very good job helping those who come from the non-OO background (especially VB 6) into understanding the OO facets of VB.NET. I think that is where this book is the most solid. The first seven chapters or so you'll think it's a 4-5 star book, however it falls off after that. My reasoning for this is that coverage on debugging and deploying .NET applications is basically non-existent. Although the coverage on tracing was a little better, it could have been stronger and far... more info

Great at Firts:

Overall this is a pretty good book but unfortunately it falls apart at the end. The first 2/3 of this book are very detailed and complete with most things shown from both the command line as well as from the IDE, but, I can only guess that the author got tired (the book is over 1,000 pages) and got a little sloppy for the last 1/3. Unfortunately, the last 1/3 has important topics like ADO.NET and ASP.NET. These are not covered nearly as well as the earlier topics. In addition, the author puts things like... more info

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