Many articles have appeared in the press about Visual Basic .NET being radically different from prior versions of Visual Basic. Unfortunately, most of the articles leave you with more questions than answers. What exactly are the changes in Visual Basic .NET? Will it be possible to upgrade existing applications? Why does it break compatibility with Visual Basic 6? Visual Basic .NET includes an Upgrade Wizard, which upgrades up to 95 percent of your project’s code, but what about the other 5 percent? What are the common upgrade issues? How do you resolve them and get your project working in Visual Basic .NET? What about XML Web services and ADO.NET data access—how can existing programs take advantage of these new features?
In this book, we answer these questions and more. We provide a complete guide to upgrading, with both technical and conceptual information. To upgrade your applications, you will need to learn some new skills. We teach these skills and discuss the hows, whats, and whys of upgrading: how to recognize the micro-issues that need a one-line fix, what to do about macro-issues that involve redesign of your application, and why Microsoft made the changes to Visual Basic.
Along the way, we’ll take a few interesting digressions. Because we worked on the team that created Visual Basic .NET, we’ll share a few behind-the-scenes stories about Visual Basic and the development of Visual Basic .NET.
In addition to discussing how to upgrade applications, this book is also an upgrading reference. Chapter 8 includes the complete list of errors and warnings that the Upgrade Wizard generates. Chapter 19 maps the Microsoft Windows common controls to equivalent Windows Forms controls. Appendixes A and B give the complete Visual Basic function and object model mappings from Visual Basic 6 to Visual Basic .NET.
