Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .Net

by Joe Hummel and Ted Pattison

A guide for all Visual Basic developers who need to master OOP skills, this book addresses the stumbling block keeping experienced Visual Basic 6 developers from migrating to Visual Basic .NET. It... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201734958
• ISBN13: 9780201734959
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 562 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

An essential resource, none better for moving to .NT

As a college instructor, I have literally reviewed more than a dozen books on the Visual Basic .NET language. This books is far above its peers. It is well-organized, thorough, insightful, and clearly presents is topics. I can think of no better resource for experienced developers who need to transition to Visual Studio .NET and Visual Basic .NET.With coverage of essential topics such as the Common Language Runtime, the .NET Framework, changes in object-oriented programming, and managing and deploying assemblies, this text covers EVERY essential change in Visual Basic .NETThat having been said, this book is not intended for new Visual Basic developers. You will not find the introductory material necessary to get you up to speed in Visual Basic programming. A familiarity with previous Visual Basic versions and a rock-solid understanding of object-oriented programming theory and methodology is essential.This is a hard-core professional reference, ready to give experienced programmers a jump-start into Visual Basic .NET, and its the best professional coverage of changes in .NET that I've found out there.

It doesn't get any better than this

I was looking at this book the other day and wasn't sure about it. I've recently picked up a few copies of Addison-Wesley's .NET Developer's series and really loved them, but thought "Oh boy, another VB.NET component book" But, when I looked at the cover, Francesco Balena and Rockford Lhotka both wrote parts of the Foreword and couldnt' have said nicer things. Well, I have everything that either of them have written and respect both of those authors blindly. If Balena or Lhotka say this book is good, it's good. Well, it's fabulous. Pattison is nothing short of amazing. The level of detail he covers things in is almost scarry. If you want to understand your art, and your art is VB.NET, this book is for you.. I couldn't find something to criticize about this book if you paid me to. Great examples, even better explanations and an author that can communicate to anyone - and can get his point across very succinctly!So, now I've now added Pattison to my list of Balena, Appleman, MacDonald and Lhotka as my favorite VB authors!

A must-read book, even for experienced VB programmers

I can't be the only VB programmer who has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the OO world - as I've followed VB through its update history. But in the .NET world OO is everything, including lots of concepts that I've used but never really got round to reading up on and learning from the ground up. Things like inheritance, polymorphism and delegates are obvious examples. And then there's the .NET-specific stuff, like boxing, value-types and reference-types, method over-riding and dynamic binding. OK, so you can get away with knowing "just enough to get by", but this book really does make it easy to catch up on the concepts and terminology - even if you are fairly new to programming. I found it extremely easy to read, sharp and to the point, and even has those nice disguised touches of humor. I can't figure out yet why the FetchSlippers method in my implementation of the SuperDog class still doesn't work!My advice: if you can't explain straight out to someone what boxing or polymorphism means now, you'll be a better programmer for reading this book. Well done Ted and Joe...

In Depth

This book provides a truly in depth look at VB.NET and, very importantly, the .NET framework. This really takes you "under the hood" and shows you what your program is REALLY doing. As noted, this isn't a "code" book, but focuses more on design and theory. If you're already a developer and wish to learn more about VB.NET and the .NET Framwork, this will probably be a good fit. If you're not already comfortable in a programming environment, this definitely would not be a good starting point. Fortunately the authors make clear that you should have prior experience with VB, C++ or Java.