This course is about programming using the Visual Basic language. It's written for complete beginners so I have tried to explain everything. If you're an experienced programmer, you'll probably discover that you already know a lot of what is in this course. But if you're completely new to programming, this course is what you're looking for.
The version of Visual Basic we'll use is called Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition and it is totally free and the course is totally free too. You can download all of the software you will need from Microsoft.
If you're looking for a more complete course that covers more advanced topics, I recommend the Visual Basic .NET 2008 Express - A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial.
Lesson Three Content
Visual Basic .NET for Beginners
About Programming in Visual Basic .NET
An Introduction to "Types"
An Introduction to "Procedures"
Types, Procedures, Properties, and Methods
The Days Between Dates Program If you're looking for the first Lesson to start at the beginning of this tutorial, click here: Lesson One.
About Programming in Visual Basic .NET
You might remember that "programming" was discussed in Lesson 1. That was a "close up" view - right down to the binary digits - to give you a foundation of understanding about how computers work. But Visual Basic programming doesn't work at that level. This time, we look at the "the big picture" about programming in Visual Basic .NET. But I'll be making frequent references back to earlier lessons to tie everything together.
In my view, however, "understanding the whole programming job" does not include understanding each and every component and object in VB.NET. There are two reasons that I don't do that here.
You can find books about Visual Basic with more than a thousand pages that do try to explain them. But there is so much in VB.NET that it would take a a wall of thousand page books to even come close. I know. Before the web, I had shelves of books to document even the less capable versions of Visual Basic used back then. But today, you can find all this documented at the Microsoft web site. It doesn't make sense to duplicate it. (It often does make sense to explain Microsoft's documentation, however. Their documentation is like a law book. Their goal is to be complete and exact, not to be easy to understand. You can find those explanations in articles here, at About Visual Basic.)
But the second reason I don't even try to explain all of the components and objects in VB.NET is that nobody remembers all of it. When you need a particular function, you look it up to make sure you understand exactly how it works. But there are still general principals and common functions that all work about the same way. That's what this course is all about.
If you do need to look something up at Microsoft, go to ...
msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ This illustration shows the MSDN library with the Visual Basic section expanded. You can expand and collapse sections using the "+" and "-" icons in the hierarchy chart on the left side.
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Substitute your own country code into the web address for support in your own language. For example, if I use ...
msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/ ... then I get this introduction in the German language:
Die MSDN Library ist ein unverzichtbares Nachschlagewerk für Entwickler ... At the end of the lesson, we're going to program a new modification of the program that we worked with in the first two lessons. This one will calculate the number of days between any two dates using the very same MonthCalendar control.