From Dan Mabbutt,
Your Guide to Visual Basic.
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Feb 14 2008

This is a free tutorial to help beginning programmers get up to speed using Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express. To get the most from this tutorial, you might want to start at the beginning:

Part 1 - A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial - An introduction to the course.

The Reality of Online Learning

The basics that you need to code in Visual Basic .NET are explained in this segment of the About Visual Basic VB Express tutorial. This doesn't cover all of the language in detail because you can get that at Microsoft's site and in the Help for VB Express. What it does is show you where you can get information and briefly explain the basic structure of the VB.NET language. The emphasis is on explaining the concepts in VB.NET rather than the specific language rules. (Programming language rules are usually called syntax.)

The reality of online learning is that the best way to get help and instruction is from a variety of sources ... usually in parallel. So, if you want to learn VB Express, I think my tutorial is a great way to do it. But I expect that you will also try other web pages and maybe a book or two while you're reading my tutorial. And there is no way that I can duplicate the thousands of pages of documentation about VB.NET that you can find online, so I don't even try.

What I do is explain things in a way that I think is better than Microsoft and even better than the other pages you can find. I use examples you can understand and I don't try to impress you with the biggest words I know. And I do tell you about those other sources of information.

Where To Go For More Help

The first stop for detailed syntax help is MSDN - the Microsoft Developers Network. This can be confusing because Microsoft uses the name MSDN for a lot of things. It's the name of a magazine and a way of buying their software on a subscription basis. But it's also the name of their web site for help with detailed questions about language syntax and rules and it's a better source for that kind of information than any other source I know.

The home page for the MSDN web site is: MSDN.Microsoft.com but starting at the top and browsing is time-consuming and not an efficient way to get what you need. The best way is searching. And here's a tip: Never search for "VB". Always spell it out: Visual Basic. Microsoft doesn't use the shorthand VB on their site (there must be a rule against it) so you just won't find anything.

Microsoft works hard at trying to provide developer resources. Here are just a few:

• MSDN
• KnowledgeBase
• Forum Questions
• CodeZone
• Channel 9
• Blogs

KnowledgeBase is a structured library of problems and solutions written by Microsoft engineers. If your question is actually more of a bug, KnowledgeBase is where to find the answer. If you see a reference to a code that starts with the letters "KB" (like, for example, "kb327433"), then it's a knowledgebase document that describes some specific issue. You see these referenced in a lot of other places too. You can enter that number directly into a Microsoft search and go right to the article.

The only problem with Knowledgebase (and it's actually a problem across all of Microsoft) is that the documents look like they were written by engineers. And some of them look like they were edited by a team of lawyers too. (That's where my page comes in. I write in your language!)

Forum Questions can be a good source of information, but I would try that only if other sources don't work. It's a volunteer operation and it looks like it. Some of the volunteers are very smart and capable ... and some aren't. A lot of questions simply go unanswered. So you can burn through quite a bit of time just reading useless comments. But there's a better way to do this too. See below.

CodeZone is a "developer community" sponsored by Microsoft. The problem with CodeZone is that it looks like a "sponsored site". This article lays out the problem. Again, there's a better way.

MSDN Blogs is one of the newer ways that Microsoft is trying to "capture" developer input. But it's primarily written by Microsoft employees. The thing that is right about it is that the information is usually pretty "cutting edge" because there seems to be a competition for who can write about the most advanced topics. The thing that is wrong about it is that it's just not organized.

Channel 9 In the "readme.txt" link, they write, "Channel 9 is all about the conversation. ... Channel 9 is not a marketing tool, not a PR tool, not a lead generation tool." When they say that, "It's not about the money!" then you know one thing for certain: It's about the money.

On the next page, we look at the "better way" to find information. Using Google search.