In a recent interview, the Paul Kimmel said that the most exciting thing about software today is that, "companies are starting to take design seriously." When asked to name a favorite technical book, he picked Dan Appleman's concept-oriented (rather than detail-oriented) "Moving to VB.NET". Taking advantage of object oriented design in a .NET world, according to the Kimmel, is the way to "unleash" Visual Basic. This is a cookbook of examples about how that is done.

There are a lot of ways to approach the job of explaining VB.NET and all of them are used by at least one of the books in this Guide. Some books explain it by showing us actual real-world systems. Some explain it by describing the architectural foundations of VB.NET. This book teaches us VB.NET by explaining all it's parts in a readable and friendly format. For example, the book carefully answers the question, "What are all of those project templates ("Windows Application," "Console Application," and so forth) that I can choose from when I create a new project?" When you finish reading the descriptions of each template, you understand not only what they are, but also a lot about how and when to use them, and why Microsoft did it that way. And you still have a reference book that you can use later.

The risk of this approach is that sometimes topics that are tied together in a very meaningful way don't get explained that way because they're covered in a series of disconnected sections. The student can miss the big picture because it's presented in small pieces.

For example, when it's initially discussed, the potentially rich topic of "references" is dismissed in just a couple of paragraphs because it's part of a discussion of how to use the VB.NET IDE. The obvious thread into VB.NET class libraries isn't even hinted at and although a discussion of namespaces is only a few pages away, the connection here isn't clear either. The connections between "references," "namespaces," and "class libraries" are divided into half a dozen parts of the book. The complete picture is there, but many students might miss it on a first reading.

One of the themes of the book that I found most entertaining and refreshing is the conversational tone filled with personal stories and insider references. To illustrate the kind of productivity gain that is possible in moving up to GDI+, the Kimmel used his personal experience discovering that it takes forty hours to drive a car from Michigan to Las Vegas and only five to fly. (I wonder if that includes getting a taxi to the Comdex convention center.) Applications: XML, Web Services, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, GDI+

Paul Kimmel is another one of the techie ronin samurai that roam the technology landscape. His chosen weapon is VB.NET today and he's based in the midwest. You can also read more of his work at his web page.