VB.NET Language in a Nutshell begins with a brief overview of the new Visual Basic .NET language, covering basic programming concepts and introduces the .NET Framework Class Library and programming with attributes. The bulk of the book presents an alphabetical reference to Visual Basic .NET statements, procedures, functions, and objects. Also included is a CD-ROM that allows the reference section of the book to integrate with Visual Studio .NET.
Microsoft Visual Basic began its life just eleven years ago as a kind of amalgamation of Microsoft's QBasic programming language and a graphical interface design program developed in part by Alan Cooper. Since then, it has become by far the most popular programming language in the world, with an installed base that is estimated at five to eight million developers worldwide.
The tenth anniversary of Visual Basic coincided with the announcement of Microsoft's new .NET platform, and with a totally revised and revamped version of VB named Visual Basic .NET. The language has been streamlined and modernized, and many old "compatibility" elements have been dropped from the language, while other language elements that were implemented as statements are now either functions or procedures.
In addition, many of you will be glad to hear that Visual Basic is now a fully object-oriented programming language, with the inclusion of the long sought-after class inheritance, as well as other OOP features.
We suspect that many of you will greet with mixed emotions, as do we, the fact that Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM), the technology that was at the core of Visual Basic since the release of Version 4.0, has been abandoned in favor of the .NET platform. On the one hand, we find this to be a great relief, because COM can be so complex and confusing. On the other hand, we find this somewhat irritating, because we have invested so much time and effort in learning and using COM. Finally, we find this change somewhat frightening; who knows what pitfalls await us as we become more familiar with this new technology?
The best news of all is that, whereas in the past, Visual Basic served as a "wrapper" that simplified and hid much of the complexity of Windows and the Windows operating system, at long last Visual Basic is an "equal player" in the .NET Framework; Visual Basic programmers have full and easy access to the features of the .NET platform, just as Visual C++ and C# programmers do.
The extensive changes to the language and the introduction of the .NET platform make a reference guide to the Visual Basic language more essential than ever. At the same time, they make it easy to delineate this book's subject matter. This is a book that focuses on the language elements of Visual Basic .NET — on its statements, functions, procedures, directives, and objects (notably the Err and Collection objects).
