The first time I ever heard from Alessandro was through my blog contact form. A few years ago he reached out to me about his interest in donating an article to the Visual Basic Developer Center on MSDN. Reading his email, it was immediately apparent that Alessandro was passionate about programming and particularly the Visual Basic language. With a quick Internet search I was at his blog and learning about him and the Visual Basic Tips and Tricks community. Not long after we published his first article, Alessandro was awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for his exceptional community leadership and technical expertise.
I remember at the time how fun it was working with Alessandro and to see his excitement and passion for the developer community—something we both share. Today he continues to help me with the VB Dev Center to provide training content for developers. I always smile when I get an email from Alessandro, because I know he’s going to reach out to help by sending me more articles or ideas on improving the site. When he told me he was writing this book, I was excited for the VB community, because I know how much his online content helps the community today. And the passion he has for Visual Basic comes through in everything he writes.
Visual Basic is an amazing language. I started picking it up around 2000 with the release of .NET and it really helped me navigate the vastness of the platform. Particularly things like background compilation and Intellisense gave me immediate cues about whether the code I was attempting to write was correct. Also, coming from a more dynamic language background, it was much easier to write the types of data-oriented systems I was building using a language that was both static and dynamic at the same time. With the release of Language Integrated Query (LINQ), data became much easier to work with and Visual Basic’s support for LINQ is extremely full featured with its set of expanded query operators and easy to use language syntax. Coupled with the latest features in 2010 like implicit line continuation and multiline and statement lambdas makes Visual Basic one of the premiere modern programming languages of today. Millions of developers agree.