vB BOoks

*Hi, i have been looking for a good book that goes into more advanced VB progging. Obviously, i have searched google and whatnot and there a million different books. Im wondering if someone has a book that they really think stands out above the rest. I like books that have code examples in the text, an attached CD is not necessary as long as teh book gives good examples. My VB experience is one year of course work, this is all my school offers. C++ is much more my forte and it is what im studying now, but i would like to begin using vb.net so i figure i must first learn advanced vB b4 going into that. thanks for any help, and plz as many opinions as i can get would be great!!!

I think you should be able to start in VB.NET straight away.
I can recommend "VB6 Bible" which I found very good.

Good luck!

Our company has a lot of software written in VB6, and when VB.NET first came out I had the assignment of researching it and giving a presentation to our development department as to the merits and drawbacks of the changes to the language, and whether or not we would be able to easily migrate.

VB6 and VB.NET are, for all practical purposes, two completely different languages with some common syntax (sort of like JavaScript and Java). I was struck by how much VB.NET resembles C++, but uses English words instead of symbols. I think if you already know C++ you will have no trouble learning VB.NET.

I don't think, however, that you would need to learn VB6 before .NET. In my presentation I said that the people who are going to have the most trouble moving to VB.NET are self-taught programmers who only know VB6 and don't really understand programming, but that college students who took C++ and had a semester of VB6 would be able to pick it right up. I think that knowing VB6 really well is going to make it harder to learn VB.NET, because the first thing you have to do is unlearn all of the crappy half-assed ways you have to get things done in VB6 in order to learn a proper programming language.

There are plenty of good books on both VB6 and VB.NET (and .NET in general). The one I have is O'Reilly's Programming Visual Basic.NET. Microsoft released a whole slew of .NET books as well. You might want to look into a Safari subscription too. They have a lot of .NET books, and you can read 5 a month for $10. Hope this helps.

Safari
Programming Visual Basic.NET

moexu<< Thank you so much!! This is exactly what i was looking for. I've been doing C++ for almost 2 years now, and i really really love the language. Compared to Vb, well its not really a comparison, i HATE VISUAL BASIC CODING! I'm into object oriented progging and vB6 seemed to make that so hard in comparison with C++. I just recieved my copy of .net the other day(the full version with EVERY possible feature) and have been tooling around with it for a few hours. I have noticed that the layout is a lot different with the windows and Solution manager and whatnot, kind of confusing actually but i guess i will get used to it. I would like to ask u since u seem fairly knowledgable about .net, have u done any research on C#? I have yet to mess around with that yet...

Thanks, I'm glad I could help. My understanding of C# is that it's essentially Microsoft Java. The syntax is very, very similar. There really isn't much difference in speed or features of C# vs. VB.NET, since they both are compiled into an intermediary language and they both have access to all of the same libraries. The choice is really more a matter of personal preference (i.e., do you like coding with curly braces or without? ). With your C++ experience (especially if you know any Java) C# might be even easier for you to pick up than VB.

Another difference between the two is that Microsoft proposed that C# be a standard language, so C# won't be entirely proprietary. (There's a project called Mono that's working on an open source implementation of the .NET framework with C#). All of the other developers at our company wanted to move to C# if we went to .NET rather than VB because it's open and they thought it would be less likely that we would get in a situation like where we are now, with thousands of lines of VB6 code and no easy way to convert them.

The biggest challenge with .NET is learning the framework and all of the classes that are available to you. The choice of language is really more a matter of personal preference. (Some would argue that you really need to know both languages if you want to be a .NET developer, but that's a whole other topic ). So my advice would be to play with both of them, see which one you like better, and go with that.