Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 Kick Start

Rating:
Summary: The news about what's new in VB.NET
Review: As someone whose Visual Basic (VB) experience extends back to early in version 4.0 and who is an object-oriented veteran, when I heard the early news about VB.NET I was certainly more intrigued than I was over versions 5 and 6. The announced changes were certainly welcome from my point of view, as it appeared that some of the more treacherous aspects of VB were being eliminated. However, the initial response to VB.NET was more negative than Microsoft expected, leading to the elimination of some of the proposed changes. With this as a background, when searching for material on VB.NET, my interest was in a book that concentrated primarily on the differences between version 6 and VB.NET. This book does exactly that.
Like all upgrades, some of the changes are only slight to cosmetic. Nevertheless, you must learn them, as they could lead to the VB.NET environment rejecting version 6 code. Examples of this are the interpretation of the "Option" statements and the elimination of default object properties. In version 6, if text1 is a textbox, then an assignment of the form

text1="Hello World"

would be a shorthand representation for

text1.text="Hello World"

and acceptable. However, it cannot be done in VB.NET. Most implicit recasting is now disallowed and some data types are no longer supported.
However, the real differences between the versions are the incorporation of object-oriented principles into the language. Exceptions are now the way in which errors are handled and VB.NET also has inheritance, more explicit event handling, interfaces, constructors and overloading. This new way of doing things can be learned and the descriptions in this book are thorough without overloading you with unnecessary verbiage. Independent of whether you already understand the principles of object-oriented programming or not, if you are making the transition to VB.NET, then you will find the descriptions of value.
Unlike some other books that demonstrate once again how to build simple projects in VB.NET, which shows you almost nothing new, the author of this book has made the conscious and wise decision to show you the differences, which for a VB veteran, is all you really need.