Resources

Where can you go for additional Visual Basic support? You can find Visual Basic user groups all over, and more are appearing every day. Although the content varies in accuracy, there are many usenet groups dedicated to Visual Basic as well, but be careful what you read there—there's no guarantee it's accurate. About three dozen of those groups are hosted by Microsoft, including the following:

microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.vb
microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.vb.upgrade
microsoft.public.vb.bugs
microsoft.public.vb.addins
microsoft.public.vb.controls
microsoft.public.vb.database
microsoft.public.vb.installation
microsoft.public.vb.syntax

Other, non-Microsoft groups include some of these usenet forums:

comp.lang.basic.visual
comp.lang.basic.visual.3rdparty
comp.lang.basic.visual.announce
comp.lang.basic.visual.database
comp.lang.basic.visual.misc

And, of course, there are plenty of Web pages out there on Visual Basic. Here are a few starter pages from Microsoft:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/ The main Visual Basic page
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/technical/articles.asp The tech page for Visual Basic
www.microsoft.com/net/default.asp The home page for the .NET initiative

And that it; that's all the introduction we need—it's time to start digging into Visual Basic .NET now. As I said, this book has been designed to be your complete support package for Visual Basic .NET, so if you see something that should be covered and isn't—let me know. In the meantime, happy programming!