Programming Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2005: The Language (Pro Developer)

Programming Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2005: The Language (Pro Developer)
by Francesco Balena

Programming Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2005: The Language (Pro Developer)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Francesco Balena
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-02-22
ISBN: 0735621837
Number of pages: 990
Publisher: Microsoft Press

Book Reviews of Programming Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2005: The Language (Pro Developer)

Book Review: Excellent, monumental book - but not for everyone
Summary: 5 Stars

Visual Basic appeared more than 15 years ago as a tool to define quick prototypes and develop GUI applications with ease. Its development environment, which the language was literally blended in, was remarkably easy to use. I remember those good old days when a fellow colleague of mine showed me how to draw VB forms and in less than an hour after I was already developing a new GUI application.

Visual Basic has gone through a long way since then. The language is nowadays a powerful, complex, potent medium to develop sophisticated applications. In fact, Visual Basic.NET is virtually on par with C#.

"Visual Basic 2005: The Language" by Francesco Balena tries to show - in a gentle yet dense manner - the long way that VB has pursued over the years and well as the current state of affairs. It succeeds on both counts.

The book is divided in four bigs parts:
1) The Basics - which introduces the reader to what Visual Basic.NET is all about, with explicit references to the differences between VB6 and VB.NET (very useful for VB6 programmers).
2) Object Oriented Programming - which presents the OOP support in VB.NET. This section is important because VB.NET departs from the old OOP support and gets more in line with the .NET paradigm.
3) Working with the .NET Framework - which may be seen as a natural continuation of the previous part in the context of the .NET framework.
4) Advanced Topics - which tackles how advanced .NET elements (like attributes) get handled in VB.NET as well as what VB.NET is still better than, say, C# (namely the interop with COM and Automation).

The book is truly monumental in form and dense in content. The style is slightly verbose but this adds value: you cannot skip pages without losing valuable information and in such conditions reading a book of this size is quite a task.

As an added bonus, the author presents several mini-projects that are in fact mini how-to tutorials: how to build a plug-in for WinForms, how to develop a n-tier application. Without the generosity of Mr. Balena you'd have to buy an extra book for an introduction in such useful stuff.

"Visual Basic 2005" has several minor drawbacks, though:
1) The remarks showing the differences between VB6 and VB.NET are scattered throughout the text. For a VB6 programmer this is difficult to follow and for a non-VB6 programmer this is slightly annoying. Perhaps Mr. Balena should have dedicated a special chapter to those differences and then forget about them.
2) The book does not say much about all the other .NET languages, as if VB.NET is the only .NET language under the sun. In fact, .NET diminishes the differences between languages without making them identical. This is not apparent from this book.
3) The book does not say enough about what is specific to Visual Basic, besides syntax. Why would anyone want to program in Visual Basic.NET when you have C#? In my opinion, Visual Basic.NET is not going to go away any time soon especially because it retains those qualities of VB6 - a verbose and intuitive syntax, a loose typing system (perfect fit for Automation interop) as well as a slightly better exception catching mechanism. In my opinion, "Visual Basic 2005" does not elaborate enough on such necessary topics.

Overall, the book is a must if you want to come up to speed with the Visual Basic language after years of programming in other languages. However, if you want to learn Visual Basic from scratch or if you want to use Visual Basic.NET for more "mundane" tasks - such as building WinForm applications - then this book is not for you.

Summary of Programming Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2005: The Language (Pro Developer)

Get the essential, straightforward information you need to master the core capabilities of Visual Basic 2005. Focusing on the language and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 base class library, a well-known authority on Visual Basic provides both new and experienced developers the pragmatic guidance and examples they need to build innovative solutions.

Discover how to:

  • Compress files, manipulate ACLs, use semaphores, and exploit other new capabilities in the .NET Framework 2.0
  • Implement generics to define a type-safe data structure
  • Use inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces, delegates, and attributes to write flexible applications
  • Use the My namespace to perform common tasks more easily
  • Work with the new editing and debugging features of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
  • Master regular expressions and perform complex text searches and input validation
  • Take advantage of streams, serialization, and threading techniques
  • Implement advanced programming techniques based on custom attributes, reflection, and on-the-fly compilation
  • Interact with legacy code by using PInvoke and COM Interop
  • Understand key differences from Visual Basic 6.0Get code samples on the Web

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