Visual Basic .NET 2008 Express - Using Data and Serializing to Files

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. The Complete Table of Contents for this course can be found on the first page of part 1: A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial.

In this lesson and in the next one, we'll be developing two new versions of the About Visual Basic Signature Block program. Each will emphasize a different technology to manage data. In this lesson, we'll check out the technique of serializing data to a file. In the next lesson, we'll use an XML document instead. Both of these techniques have strong arguments to recommend them and we'll look at the differences between them.

Data technologies are moving fast!

Although this is a course for beginners, the technologies that we will use are pretty advanced. Here's my philosophy on that:

Many courses start you out with simple, but seriously outdated techniques. For example, to read and write to files, some courses still use "comma delimited files" also called "comma separated values" (file.csv files) using the Visual Basic Input and Write statements. These techniques were the mainstream way to deal with small amounts of data in VB6 and earlier, but .NET has much better technology. It seems to me that it just doesn't make sense to teach techniques that are already obsolete just to make examples a litte easier. So this course teaches the latest technology, but we proceed slowly and carefully.

On the next page, one of the areas in Microsoft's technology supermarket that is pushing out the boundaries the fastest is introduced: ADO.NET.