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What's in This Book

Just about everything we could write about Visual Basic .NET is in this book, and that's a lot of ground to cover. From a complete language reference to ADO.NET database programming, from creating Web applications to dragging and dropping data adapters onto forms, and from creating Windows and Web controls to setup programs, it's all here (or almost all of it anyway!).

Here's some of what we'll see in this book:

• The Visual Basic Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

• The Complete Visual Basic Syntax

• Using Structured Exception Handling

• Exception Filtering in the Catch Block

• Throwing Exceptions

• Creating Windows Applications

• Creating Web Applications

• Showing and Hiding Controls and Forms

• Working with Multiple Forms

• Creating Multiple Document Interface (MDI) Applications

• Creating Dialog Boxes

• Creating Owned Forms

• Anchoring and Docking Controls

• Adding and Removing Controls at Run Time

• Creating Always-on-Top Forms

• Sending Keystrokes to Other Programs

• Setting the Mouse Pointer

• Using nearly every Windows and Web control available, from text boxes to file dialog boxes, from list boxes to three-state checkboxes, from toggle buttons to splitters, and from ad rotators to validation controls

• Creating Menus

• Creating Submenus

• Creating Menu Access Keys

• Changing a Menu Item's Caption at Run Time

• Drawing Menu Items Yourself

• Merging MDI Menus

• Creating Context Menus

• Printing

• Creating Tree Views

• Creating List Views

• Creating Toolbars

• Hot Tracking Tabs

• Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)

• Creating Classes, Objects, OOP Structures, Modules, and Constructors

• Creating Data Members, Methods, Properties, and Events

• Overloading Methods

• Creating Class Libraries

• Inheriting from a Base Class

• Overriding Base Class Members

• Overloading Base Class Members

• Creating Interfaces

• Working with Polymorphism

• Drawing Figures with Pens

• Repainting Windows

• Filling Figures with Brushes

• Handling Images

• Opening or Creating Files

• Forcing Event Handling in Web Forms

• Writing HTML to a Web Form at Run Time

• Detecting Browser Type and Capabilities

• Saving Program Data across Server Round Trips

• Creating Web Form Validators

• Creating Web Form Ad Rotators

• Using Basic SQL

• Creating a New Data Connection

• Creating a Dataset

• Data Access Using Data Adapter Controls

• Using Relational Databases

• Adding Multiple Tables to a Dataset

• Using Data Views

• Simple and Complex Data Binding

• Navigating in Datasets

• Using Parameterized SQL Queries

• Creating Multi-tier, Distributed Database Applications

• Using Master/Detail Relationships and Data Relation Objects

• Accessing Individual Data Items in a Dataset

• Looping Over All Tables in a Dataset

• Writing Datasets to XML and Reading Datasets from XML

• Creating a Data Relation Object in Code

• Creating Master/Detail Web Forms

• Creating User Controls

• Creating Web User Controls

• Creating Multithreaded Applications

• Starting, Suspending, Resuming, Stopping, and Sleeping Threads

• Synchronizing Threads

• Joining Threads

• Creating a Windows Service

• Creating a Windows Service Installer

• Creating a Web Service

• Deploying Applications

In addition, the CD that accompanies this book holds the code for all the major projects we develop—to see how to use those projects, take a look at the readme.txt file on the CD. All the examples in this book have been tested by at least two people on two different machines, and each example has been carefully verified to work as it should. (Here's an important note—in the past, Microsoft has changed Visual Basic without changing major or minor version number, and these unannounced changes have meant that people with the new Visual Basic can't get some examples in the book to work—see the readme.txt file on the CD for more details. I try my best to keep up with these unannounced changes, but you should know that all the examples in the book have been fully tested—if you get compilation errors with an example, one thing to check is if Visual Basic itself has been changed. If you suspect it has, please send me email via Coriolis at once so I can get a fix up on the book's Web site quickly for everyone else.)

That's just some of what's coming up—Visual Basic .NET is a big topic, and the topics we'll cover number in the hundreds. And if you have suggestions for more, please send them in!