Moving to VB.NET: Strategies, Concepts, and Code, Second Edition  
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Author Daniel Appleman
Publisher APress
Length 640 pages
vbRad Rating: 4.5 fingers up. (4.5 out of 5)
Reviewed by Robert

For better or for worse, Dan Appleman's books are always compared to his Win32 API Guide, which has come to be very important to VB. Not to mention that it is most likely the bestselling book in the VB world. It is probably a safe bet to say that he won't be writing any API Guides for VB.NET since the need doesn't truly exist. So when I got this book in the mail I was curious whether Appleman could translate his story-telling magic and programmer's humor to the new platform. Having read the book I think that he definetely spent a lot of time with it, and given that this is the Second Edition of the book he talks a lot about things that have been proven to work on the new platform. Speaking of Second Edition, it has coverage of .NET Framework 1.1 and Visual Studio .NET 2003 and all that it entails (new features, paradigms, etc...)

At the same time, "Moving to VB.NET" is different from all the other .NET books that have flooded the market. It is logically broken up into 3 parts: strategies, concepts, code and "Wonderful world of .NET". First part is important because the author outlines the economics of moving to .NET. Can you afford to move to .NET? Can your business afford it? Can you afford not to? Next, he goes through the new concepts in VB.NET, such as inheritance, memory management, multithreading, etc... Keep in mind, Appleman doesn't just mention these concepts no -- he goes into unbelivable depth with them, particularly the tricky subject of multithreading. Basically, he warns the unwashed VB masses to stay away from it unless "you know what you are doing". I am glad, he devoted an entire chapter to warning people about the dangers, because my first foray into multithreading happened many years ago in OS/2 2.1, using C++ Set (now called Visual Age for C++). I jumped into it with great enthusiasm, but with very little practical knowledge of threading and it ended with long and difficult debugging sessions, unable to catch those elusive bugs or lockups, that are inevitably introduced in multithreaded applications. In part III, Appleman goes deep into code. He tells us about the commands from our beloved VB6 that have vanished, then about data types, operators, language syntax (pretty much the same as before), objects and reflection (which pretty much means "find out stuff about yourself"). The last major part of the book is "Living with .NET".

All in all -- an excellent and engaging read. I totally recommend it. There was one annoyance. Throughout the book, particularly in the beginning, Appleman keeps referring to his bizarre relationship with Microsoft. It is kind of 1984ish - he makes excuses for every little swipe at Big Brother (nothing that a stint in the reeducation camp won't fix). Is this book better than the API guide? They are two different species. The API guide was a ground-breaking reference, but "Moving to VB.NET" is an great tutorial and social commentary.


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