Michael Halvorson proclaims that Chapter 18 of Microsoft Visual Basic Step by Step is "one of the best in the book" because there's such a lot of great, practical code in it. We'll need it! Because he also warns us that printing in VB.NET is "more complex," "somewhat involved," and it "isn't trivial".

Actually, I think he's being just a little harsh!

VB 6 is like a toolshop with just one tool. That makes it easy to learn and use, but very limited. VB.NET is like a whole garage full of tools. You can think of that as being "more complex". I think of it as being more useful.

The way to get your mind around it is the same way you would do that for a garage full of tools: "one at a time". That's why a lot of practical code is a great idea at this point and you're going to see more code in this lesson - both here and in the book - than in any previous one! So let's get started!

The key to the examples in the book is a clear understanding of event handlers. We looked at this subject back in the lesson for chapter 6, Beyond the Book: Modifying the Event Handler. But to get the most out of this chapter, we need to know more.

The book brushes past this critically important subject in a couple of sentences on page 463:

"An event handler is ... a mechanism that handles system events."

Not very satisfying. - You need more than that! So in this lesson, we're going to go plunge into event handlers in a big way and demonstrate exactly how they work for you.

In contrast to previous lessons, it might be better if you read this lesson before reading chapter 18 because it should help you understand what is in the book.