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Visual Basic is arguably the most popular application development programming
language in use today. Thousands, if not millions, of programmers use it
every day to build both commercial and scientific applications. The language
is also one of the most maligned programming languages, second perhaps
only to Cobol.
The newest version of Visual Basic, Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET), should
eventually quiet many of those who call Visual Basic a toy language. Microsoft
performed a major redesign of Visual Basic and added many features that put
the language on equal footing with the other major .NET language, C#, and
with other contemporary languages, especially Java.
One area of the language that has seen significant improvement is VB.NET’s
object-oriented programming features. In previous versions of Visual Basic,
many of these features were partially implemented, not implemented at all, or
implemented in a wrong-headed manner. VB.NET provides the programmer
with a complete set of object-oriented tools. This book explains in detail how
to use these features.
The book is informally partitioned into three parts. Chapters 1 through
6 present the fundamentals of object-oriented programming (OOP) using
VB.NET. Chapter 1 provides a review of the syntax of VB.NET. This chapter
is especially useful for readers who have experience with an older version
of Visual Basic. Chapter 2 discusses the philosophy of OOP, including some
sections on object-oriented design and abstract data types. Chapter 3 covers
programming with structures, which are similar to user-defined types (UDTs)
in Visual Basic 6. Structures are more powerful than UDTs because you can
also define subprograms (methods) within a structure definition. |