Book Review: Professional VB.NET

Category:

C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET

Type:

Snippets

Difficulty:

Beginning

Author: Intelligent Solutions Inc.

Version Compatibility: Visual Basic.NET

Instructions: Copy the declarations and code below and paste directly into your VB project.

Declarations:
' (None)

Code:

According to the introduction of Professional VB.NET (Wrox Publishing, ISBN 1861004974), the book is intended for "experienced Visual Basic developers who need to make the transition to VB.NET." I highly recommend this book to such developers. The book is heavily focused on and very successful in teaching VB.NET with reference to Visual Basic 6.0 as a starting point.

There is a lot more to his 942 page book, however. Specifically, you will find fairly comprehensive coverage of .NET and the Common Language Runtime (CLR) architecture, object oriented programming, services such as MSMQ and COM+ and even in some cases systemic concepts such as processes and threads. To some, this might seem overwhelming, but the book is well-organized and the chapters and sub-chapters stand alone well, so it is easy enough to skip to the parts you want to read.

The first 7 chapters of the book are primarily devoted to the design and architecture of .NET and the VB.NET IDE; except for a Hello World application in Chapter 2, discussion of hands-on issues and examples do not begin until Chapter 8 on Windows Forms. Chapter 5, which details the architecture of the CLR, and Chapter 7, which covers the .NET namespaces (including the concept and listing most of the major ones) are particularly valuable; they help you understand what you are really doing when you are writing a .NET application, even though you can put one together without such an understanding.

The rest of the book focuses mostly on hands-on programming. Chapter 8 covers Windows forms in comprehensive detail, comparing .NET forms and controls to their VB counterparts wherever possible. There are three chapters on object-oriented programming, and one long chapter on database programming, in which ADO.NET is explained in detail and compared to ADO. Other chapters cover important concepts such as threading, component services (e.g., MSMQ and COM+), Windows Services, Working with XML, Deployment, and Security. There are two chapters that introduce you to ASP.NET development, but serious web developers would be better served by the Wrox book Professional ASP.NET.

The book has a number of strong points. One is the writing style. It is very easy to follow, with many useful charts, screenshots, and sample code (all the code referenced in the book is available on the Wrox web site). The examples are very good: they include a number of full-blown applications that are close to production quality and scope, and they are explained clearly and in detail.

Another strength is the content devoted to higher-level issues: the "whens" and "whys" of development as opposed to just the "how-tos." For example, the chapter on Inheritance does not just explain how to create base and child classes -- it goes into why and when (and when not) to use inheritance. Similarly, the chapter on web services explains, with examples, when to use web services and compares them to alternatives such as DCOM and CORBA.

If the book has a weakness, it would be its attempt to provide too much background information. It contains wordy explanations to concepts such as processes, threads, MSMQ, and transactions before getting to how to implement applications that use these. I suspect that those who going to use VB.NET for these types of applications do not need as much background information as the book provides. As mentioned earlier, however, it is easy enough to jump to the parts that interest you most.

One thing I would have liked to see is a discussion of when to use VB.NET as opposed to Visual Basic 6.0, and when to upgrade existing applications in VB.NET. The book devotes two sentences to these issues, merely to mention that a controversy exists regarding these questions, but it takes no position. That is too bad, because a lot of developers are confused about this issue and the opinions of the obviously knowledgeable authors would be worth considering.

In sum, Professional VB.NET walks developers through the new language and its architecture, building on what readers already know about VB 6, and presenting useful, real-world examples that are explained clearly. The book is very successful in implementing this intelligent approach to teaching .NET to experienced developers.