Visual Basic .Net Power Tools

by Evangelos Petroutsos, Richard Mansfield, Richard Mansfield

Step-by-Step Instruction on Complex Topics Leads You to the Expert Level Do you scour VB.NET books seeking solutions for esoteric database programming, debugging, security, or printing challenges, but... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0782142427
• ISBN13: 9780782142426
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Sybex
• Length: 694 Pages
• Weight: 2.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 7.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Not Scared to Be Critical of .NET

First of all, we all know that .NET harnesses way more power that VB6. However, we also know what a pain it was when we had to make that leap to adjust our thinking to the new platform, and quite frankly it was a hard one for most of us. Things that seemed rather easy before were made unnessarily difficult. (Or so it seemed to us VB6 programmers). Well this book starts right off the bat explaining the "Why's" of that and is not shy to be honest. I appreciate that, especially after reading about 7 books on my book-shelf which highly extols .NET Make no mistake about it, dotnet IS better, but the honesty these authors exhibit while explaining features (that no other dotnet book has that I have seen) is most refreshing. Great book, but is somewhat advanced. The first chapter is worth its weight in gold. If you know VB6 very well and know VB.NET somewhat, this book will help you. This will help the adjustment and transition to .NET more smoorther for advanced VB6 programmers.

Great informative book

I have purchased several vb.net books over the past couple of years, somewhere around 6-7 books. None were as informative and precise as this book. The authors provide many details that all the other books do not cover. They give many inside details that otherwise many programmers like myself would probably never know. Chapter 1 alone gives a lot of insight into the .net framework that all of my other books did not provide. Without going into every aspect of this book that makes it stand out above the rest, I'll just say this...I've completed more of my project with this book than all of the other books combined. Also, check out books by the Murach publishers; they come in at a somewhat distant second, but these books have been of great help also.

Found this useful when converting from PB

I'm a long-time Powerbuilder developer, used to the logical object model of that tool, and have been working with Visual Studio for about a week. I became >>frustrated<< that I couldn't find concise and useful documentation about the .NET object model. (And I popped for the whole MSDN Professional license, darn it, with 12 DVDs and more coming all the time.) I began searching the related literature. God bless America and the aftermarket writers. I read the first chapter of this book, "Understanding the .NET framework", and, well, this is precisely what I needed. I have a much stronger grasp of the framework, and it's strengths... and the MS documentation and it's weaknesses. The book is not only teaching me the fundamentals of the framework, it's teaching me how to corral the MS documentation to learn further. <p>I have no idea (yet) what the rest of this book contains. But without reading past chap. 1, I can tell you that the book has already paid me back.

A Good Guide for All VB.NET Developers

Don't buy this book if you've never used Visual Basic before because it won't teach you how to program. That said, it does fill in a lot of holes left by other books. One of the chapters that I really liked was the one on debugging. Most books don't discuss this topic and you just can't get the whole picture out of articles in magazines. This book puts the whole issue into perspective.I also appreciated the author's coverage of unique topics. For example, Chapter 4 discusses how to work with Microsoft Office. I haven't seen any other book that really discusses this issue, yet it's something that's very practical to know.There are other books on the market that provide great technical details, but they can put you to sleep. The authors don't crack jokes on every page, but the writing is interesting and I found the annecodotes they did provide kept the discussion lively. As an example, I went to look for one topic and only intended to spend a few moments on it. About 45 minutes later I found I had read well past the first topic because the authors present information in such a good way.This is the book to get if you already know how to use VB and really want to learn how to get some work done. While I wouldn't say it covers every topic, the topics it does cover are very practical and useful.

A really cool book for advnaced developers

I just picked up a copy of this book and was really surprised. Many books seem geared toward advanced development, but often fall short. This one certainly didn't.there are a lot of cool things covered here, but the two most striking ones are the coverage of Message Queues and Security.I just got into advanced messaging and there's not a lot of documentation out there. If you want to learn it, you used to have to stumble around until you got it right. Their coverage of the subject changes all of that. It explains messaging in depth and has many practical exapmles. In addition, it walks you through many of the common 'gotchas' you'll encounter when developing message based apps.Another great area is security. I know in my experience, I was too busy learning .NET to really focus on security. That's like being in too much of a hurry to put gas in your car. i wish I would have realized this earlier. They discuss just about every practical aspect of security and have a lot of great examples as well.These are my two favorite parts of the book, but there are many more. They explain Regular Expression for example and have tons of useful examples in it. They have a great GREP utility example that just about any developer will really enjoy.I've bought Petroutsos' other book and really enjoyed it...and history repeated itself with this one.