The editors and developers at About.Com have been busy, busy, busy thinking up new ways to enhance your user experience. And that usually results in new tasks for me as well. So this past week, I've been working on an assignment from 'the head office' that required me to take a detailed look at all of the content that I have written for About Visual Basic in the last few years.
It's been an interesting experience!
The top three articles at About Visual Basic, as reported in our newsletter this week are:
I was glad to see that your first choice was also what I would recommend. As I reported in the newsletter, this is currently the "flagship" tutorial for the site and there are lots of reasons for you to give it a try.
- It's based on the first class, free, downloadable Visual Basic .NET development system from Microsoft. Did I mention that Visual Basic Express is free?
- It's updated more frequently than anything else on the site. Check out the dates on the articles if you don't believe me. (The dates were added as a result of a request from a reader, by the way.)
- It's more complete than any other tutorial: Almost fifty pages!
- You're in control. Rather than being email based, each article in the tutorial contains links that let you decide what to read next.
And the result reinforced something I already knew: Most people come to this site to learn. That's why I have put so much effort into the Visual Basic Express tutorial.
But the second and third choices were a bit of a surprise since they're both VB 6 based and I didn't think there was still that much interest in VB 6.
I continue to add information about VB 6 to articles such as comparing how something is done in both VB 6 and VB.NET and even though I occasionally get an angry email telling me I'm a worn-out has-been, I plan to continue to add content for VB 6 programmers.
About.Com has more changes in progress and you'll see them on this page soon. Keep checking back to see what they are. And keep letting me know what you want to see on the page. As you can tell, we do pay attention!
Hi Dan,
You asked for comments regarding your VB.NET 2005 tutorial, and I’m happy to oblige you.
I’ve been programming for many years. I switched to VB in ‘93 at version 3,
and finally made the jump to .NET with the release of VS 2005. (I looked at
the prior .NET versions and thought them ‘not quite ready for prime time’.)
While I have many apps currently in service, I will never feel like I have
‘Mastered’ any language. I’ve found your course to be great reading. The
articles are short enough to read at any time, and they always have content
worth reviewing. I like seeing different techniques when I already know the material covered, and I’ve seen a few things that were totally new to me.
I’ll just name one that I use constantly now because it saves a ton of time writing code. That is the event code with multiple Handles statements. I use lots of GotFocus and KeyPress events in some projects, and the ability to group them together not only makes it easier to write, it makes the code much more coherent to read or modify.
Thanks for the great work you have done. I’ll look forward to seeing what’s
next.
Regards,
Tom Garth
Developer / Integration Specialist
R. L. Nelson and Associates, Inc.
1400 Technology Drive
Harrisonburg, VA 22802
Main Office: (888) 313-0647
http://www.rlninc.com