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

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

Product Description

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. Youll 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!

Learn from the author!
Check out Andrew's workshop schedule!

A couple of minor issues with this book.
1. Andrew Troelsen wrote "C# and the .Net Platform" first and it appears that he used the manuscript for that book to write this book. Several times in the book, the examples are in C#, not Visual Basic! See page 107. The editors failed to catch these errors.

2. Not including the index, this book is 1017 pages and that is divided up into 16 chapters. The average chapter is about 63 or 64 pages long. It seems that some of the chapters drag on and on and on.

3. There is very little cohesiveness between the examples in the chapters. In Chapter 4 (Object-Oriented Programming with VB.Net), each example does not build off of the previous example. Troelsen starts with an Employee example but finishes the chapter with a Car example. If you trying to follow along with his examples, you end up with several "Solutions" or "Projects" that are not related.


Great OO coverage but is missing some critical topics   May 8, 2003
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

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 from made up for the missing coverage of former items. Also, the ADO.NET coverage was waaaaaaaaaay too brief. For such a critical part of what MOST developers are will be using for the systems they develop (unless of course you're a game developer), I thought it was pretty bad to only have a pretty short chapter on a technology that is so critical and has been totally revamped. One could say that you should consult other books for that coverage, but I disagree because these items are critical to any VB.NET application. If that was the case, they could have just cut out almost half of this book. If you've taken any of the good practice tests, you how important MSFT thinks the stuff this book is missing is. A better overall book is the core reference, but I still give this one three stars because the coverage for the first 7-8 chapters if very good.


Great at Firts   September 25, 2002
 10 out of 12 found this review helpful

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 parameters in the code that he never bothers to explain. Perhaps he figures that by this point you should be knowledgeable enough to figure things out by yourself but I think he just got tired. Also, unfortunately, the number of errors goes up considerably in the last 1/3 of the book. Most frustrating is the fact that I took time to send the problems and corrections to the author and despite the fact that the publisher claims he will get errors corrected on the web site within 48 hours, none of my corrections ever appeared. Some were very blatant like a C# listing that should have been in VB.NET. Of course, it was pretty obvious that this was the VB version of his original C# text given this and many other smaller but similar errors.

Still, overall, its a pretty good book but authors should keep their errata up to date and the editor should have caught many of these mistakes if they put any effort into the proof reading.

I also think many of these early authors and publishers spent so much time figuring out how to do things prior to the release of the VS IDE that they feel compelled to tell you about things that took them a long time to figure out from the command line even though the IDE makes it so much simpler now. This exercise is insightful for teaching you more about how .NET really works but it gets tedious after a while. I would rather they spent the time making sure the book was correct and complete.

Again, it is a pretty good book but if the author could have persevered until the end and if he would keep his errata up to date it would have been really excellent.


Good book but could be better   July 23, 2002
 4 out of 6 found this review helpful

I bought this book based on all the 5 star ratings and I was a little disappointed. A better VB.NET book can be written and I'm sure one will if there hasn't been already.

On the plus side:
What the book does well is give its readers a detailed understanding of the .NET framework and what all the files that go with the .NET applications are about. It is definitely enough to get you started programming in VB.NET with confidence.

On the negative side:
Long chapters (approx 70 pages) that aren't broken up very well. I thought this book was boring even for a programming book. I prefer shorter chapters with more detailed end of chapter summaries and maybe exercises / examples at the end.

On the cover they claim to teach oop. I think if you teach this subject you have to point out why and your code is oop rather than having one chapter that gives the same basic explanation you can read anywhere and then have no follow up discussion what-so-ever.

The cover also claims to have no toy code. I'm not sure what they mean by that but if toy code is a simple useless program that you find in programming books to teach some concept then this has the same one repeated in different forms in most of the chapters. Basically its about a car that blows up if it goes to fast. It teaches the concepts fine but don't be fooled by the marketing on the cover.

On the neutral side:
I don't remember reading anything about printing and many of the subjects you may be writing programs for databases etc, leave it up to you to learn on your own. I didn't have a problem with this as that is what online help and online resources are for.