Gary Cornell
and
Jonathan Morrison
THIS BOOK IS ACOMPREHENSIVE, hands-on guide to the Visual Basic .NET programming language addressed to readers with some programming background. No background in Visual Basic is required, however.
While I show you the syntax of VB .NET, this book is not designed to teach you syntax. I have taken this approach because trying to force VB .NET into the framework of older versions of VB is ultimately self-defeating—you cannot take advantage of its power if you continue to think within an older paradigm.
First off, I have tried to give you a complete treatment of object-oriented programming in the context of the VB .NET language. I feel pretty strongly that without a firm foundation here, it is impossible to take full advantage of the power that VB .NET can bring to you.
Also, I have tried to cover at the least the fundamentals of every technique that a professional VB .NET developer will need to master. This includes topics like multithreading, which are too often skimped on in most books. This does not mean that I cover all the possible (or even the majority of) applications of VB .NET to the .NET platform; that would take a book two or three times the size of this one. This is a book about the techniques you need to master, not the applications themselves. (I have tried to make most of the examples realistic, avoiding toy code as much as possible.)
Finally, since most people reading this book will have programmed with some version of Visual Basic before, I have also tried to be as clear about the differences between VB .NET and earlier versions of VB as I could. However, I want to stress that this book does not assume any knowledge of earlier versions of VB, just some programming experience.