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Moving to VB.NET: Strategies, Concepts, and Code
by Dan Appleman (2nd Edition: April 8, 2003 - List Price: $44.99)
ISBN: 159059102X


Moving to VB.NET: Strategies, Concepts, and Code

VB .NET has been updated to Version 1.1. So has Dan's book!

Released with the beta version of VB .NET, this was one of the first, and probably the most influential "concept and strategy" books to be published when VB.NET and the .NET Framework first came out. (For a comparison, try the Microsoft Press Introducing Microsoft .NET.) It's clearly a book that is destined to be a classic -- continually updated, re-released, and enjoyed by every new wave of Visual Basic programmers. In fact, this book was one of two (one each by each co-founder) that originally launched the growing and successful APress foundry for techie books. And it's still going strong.


Not for beginners, this book doesn't insult your intelligence and assumes that you have enough technical background to understand the deep insights presented. It's written with a philosophical point of view rather than being just a book of code examples. For instance, there is no actual code in the book until chapter 4. And then the code is a relatively sophisticated demonstration of the memory leak problem to illustrate the difference between VB 6 and VB.NET. (And the code -- wonder of wonders -- actually runs correctly! Other books that mention this problem either fail to illustrate it with examples or provide examples that are incomplete or don't actually run.) At the same time, a non-programmer manager could read the book and get the insight needed to make top level decisions, confident that it wasn't necessary to actually run or understand all the code examples to get the knowledge from the rest of the book.

Figuring that the author knew what had changed in this latest edition better than anyone, About Visual Basic contacted Dan Appleman about it. Dan said all these things were new:

  • Completely new coverage of inheritance
  • Even more on multithreading
  • Asynchronous Design Patterns
  • Resources and Globalization in .NET
  • Introduction to .NET Remoting
  • .NET Runtime Versioning
  • Enhanced coverage of COM Interop
  • Complete VS2002 and VS2003 sample code
  • and numerous other additions and changes throughout the book.

Sounds like a new book to me!

If you're looking for a thoroughly independent, respected and knowledgeable point of view about .NET in general and VB.NET in particular, this is the book for you. You might also want to try Dan Appleman's eBook, Visual Basic.NET or C#...Which to Choose?.

About the Author

Dan Appleman is well known to VB programmers as someone who made the commitment to focus on VB as the most productive environment for building software available before it was respectable. His landmark book, Visual Basic Programmers Guide for the Win16 API (updated and now available for the Win32 API) put him on the map. He has since co-founded both APress and Desaware and remains one of the most influential independent experts on VB.

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