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New! Cutting Edge! VB 6!
Part 4: What's "not to like"?
 More of this Feature
• Part 1: New! Cutting Edge! VB 6!
• Part 2: Why Another VB 6 Book?
• Part 3: The Appendix Chapters
• Part 5: The Case studies and Library
 
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• The Guide to the VB.NET Books
• Visual Basic .NET Complete
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.NET vs VB 6 Poll
 
 Elsewhere on the Web
• The Wrox Editorial Review on PVB6
• The Wrox catalog page for PVB6
 

If I just picked this book up and started reading chapter 1 in a bookstore, I might not like it. The initial chapters don't tell you much that you can actually use. (Although there are a lot of interesting points of view expressed. The word "pontification" comes to mind.) After this introduction, however, it gets down to business. With nine authors, the style is sometimes uneven. There are some sections where the obvious is restated. "... we usually lack time, resources, or money ... In such cases, we scale back ..."

Most of the book is fairly high-level, however, and the explanations of tough topics is clear and readable.

The last chapter of PVB6 and one of the five complete books on the CD are all about VB.NET written for someone moving from VB 6. The difficulties involved in making this transition are not explained nearly as completely as the wonderful advantages of VB.NET once you get there. In that, they do a disservice to the reader. For example, Microsoft's Upgrade Wizard is dismissed in just a few paragraphs. They pass along without any comments the claim from Microsoft that the Upgrade Wizard, "copes with 95% of the code to upgrade." The CD Book Fast Track VB.NET at least notes that, "there are many things that are not so straightforward" but it doesn't provide much more information about how to solve the problems.

For another point of view about this, see the About Visual Basic article at this site that covers an actual upgrade example.

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