Professional VB.NET 2003 - Softcover

The team authorship of this title shows up in a variety of writing styles. Some early sections contain more theoretical material with a tutorial for designing classes with VB.NET, including its full support for inheritance and "classic" object-oriented design concepts like polymorphism. As this text moves forward, it gets more momentum with somewhat less prose and more examples. Standout sections include some fine material on using Windows Forms, plus excellent coverage of properties and visual design options. Coverage of custom controls is very good here and might well justify the price of this book for experts who need to design their own controls. Much of the book zeroes in on standalone application mode, though three solid chapters on Web Forms, custom Web controls, and Web services will get you started with ASP.NET on the Internet. Short code excerpts, rather than whole programs, are the rule here.

With coverage of .NET assemblies and deployment, threading and COM interoperability, experts will find what they need to get legacy COM and ActiveX components to work with .NET, as well as to start deploying .NET applications in the field. This is a title that can be skimmed in stretches to find topics that really solve day-to-day problems, particularly with the thornier areas of object-oriented design in VB (on which it is excellent though somewhat diffuse), plus advanced object-deployment, security, and other low-level details of the new .NET platform. Clearly, the new version of Visual Basic means big changes for all VB developers, but Professional VB.NET can help experienced VB users negotiate this leap successfully and help them get the most out of this new language and platform. --Richard Dragan