The Complete "VB.NET for Beginners" Course Is Now Online
VB.NET for Beginners - Lesson 3
Types, Procedures, Properties, and Methods
Lesson 3 of the Visual Basic .NET for Beginners tutorial has been posted. The tutorial is for people new to programming Visual Basic. This course totally replaces a previous course with this same name on the site. Lesson three focuses in on the symmetry between "types" in VB.NET and "properties" in objects and between "procedures" and "methods" to help you really get your head around the idea of programming objects. An updated version of the example program used in the lessons shows how to compute "days between dates" with the MonthCalendar component. . .
VB.NET for Beginners - Lesson 2
Lesson 2 of the Visual Basic .NET for Beginners - the tutorial for people new to programming Visual Basic - has been posted. This course totally replaces a previous course with this same name on the site. . . .
AutoTest: A LINQ to XML Example System
Microsoft's LINQ technology combined with XML can revolutionize the way you program, but it's difficult to make the transition from more traditional ways of programming to LINQ. Moving to XML can be a challenge.
A reader asked for help programming a system to generate random test questions. Since it seemed like an ideal way to showcase LINQ, I wrote most of the code as a programming example.
The problem with LINQ is not the concepts, it's the syntax. In general, you know what you want to do and you're pretty sure LINQ can do it. But getting the code just right can be very frustrating. So this article concentrates on just why you need all those symbols in the code and in a lot of cases, the different way the symbols can be written is shown.
Or ... Maybe you need an AutoTest program. The complete code is downloadable. To read the article Click Here.
The Beginning Tutorial
The beginning VB.NET tutorial on the site has been completely rewritten. When I read through the old one, I could only shake my head and mutter, "What was I thinking?".
Actually, my heart was in the right place even if my head wasn't. I wrote the old tutorial back before the free VB.NET Express was available and I was trying to save money for people who might not want to spend big bucks for a copy of Visual Studio .NET when they didn't even know what they were getting into yet. So the old tutorial used the free Command Prompt based VBC compiler and Notepad to write a program.
But, looking back now, I'm sure I only succeeded in confusing people even more. Compiling a Visual Basic program using VBC is a job for someone who already understands the goal. And it does nothing to help someone understand Visual Studio. Even if a beginner survived my tutorial and decided to take the next step, they would still have to learn about Visual Studio somehow.
In this new version, I try to explain everything. If you're looking for something that really does start at the beginning ... but still teaches you how to write a real program ... try my new Visual Basic .NET for Beginners.
Partial Classes
Partial Classes were introduced with Framework 2.0 and are used in a lot of different ways in VB.NET, including ASP.NET and Windows Forms. The article about them was originally written back in 2005 not long after they were introduced, but I've just updated it using VB.NET 2008. The article explains what they are and why they're useful -- including how to hide them in Visual Studio Solution Explorer -- Just like Visual Studio does! Read the article here!
Focus on Inheritance
Inheritance is the difference between VB6 and VB.NET ... Well - from a purely theoretical "object oriented" perspective anyway. VB6 had all of the other OOP features ... but it never had inheritance. I've just rewritten two articles that probe some of the dark corners of inheritance.
Versions of both of these were on the site before, but these have been updated to the current 2008 version of VB and completely rewritten.