Programming VB .NET: A Guide For Experienced Programmers  
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Author Gary Cornell, Jonathan Morrison
Publisher APress
Length 528 pages
vbRad Rating: 5 fingers up. (5 out of 5)
Reviewed by Robert

I've seen one of the authors of this book, Gary Cornell, speak at one of the VBITS events in NYC. Having read the book, I can say that he writes in the same manner he speaks. The other author, Johnathan Morrison, distinguished himself by cranking "C++ for VB programmers" - an excellent read for those looking to rip hair out of their heads, looking for that elusive runaway pointer memory leak. On to the review.

The first three chapters start just as any other .NET book does (in fact, they should all cut & paste for simplicity): by explaining what .NET is and how it will change our lives, by giving a short tour of the VS.NET IDE and by coaching us on expressions, operators and control flow. Thankfully, these are pretty short chapters, full of large pictures. Anyway, if you know this or you've programmed in VB before, just skip it.

Then, it gets good. Really good, in fact. The authors go into a detailed explanation of how classes & objects work in .NET and VB.NET, how they are different from classic VB and they give a comprehensive tour of new features. Everything is backed up by usable short pieces code of code, so it is easy to follow. This is a good thing, because whenever I see two pages of code, they've lost me. This chapter is almost 80 pages - each valuable and full of info. The authors then go on to describe inheritance, interfaces, event handling & delegates. The piece on delegates (especially on dynamic delegation) was great, because I finally understood what the hoopla was all about. This feature should be able to nicely enhance my interface-based style of n-tier programming.

The writers then provide an obligatory chapter on exception handling. If you are looking for a truly comprehensive look into the world of exceptions, I suggest Dan Appleman's Moving to VB.NET book. It provides a much deeper look. On the other hand, this chapter is good enough for 80% of the programmers.

I truly enjoyed the chapter on building desktop Windows applications. Sometimes it is forgotten in the hype storm of Web Services, XML and other "web" stuff, but MS made pretty great strides in this area. Other than simple matter, they cover form inheritance, multiple MDI parents, give an example of overloading a text box, tons of drawing (GDI+) code, printing and print preview dialog (yep, .NET includes a class that makes this a no brainer).

They follow up with IO (including a piece on file monitoring), a great example on object serialization, which allows a generic method of transmitting the object state over a network (including the internet) and restoring the object on the other hand. Really cool. There is also a chapter on multithreading, including a bit on synchronizing shared data. While this chapter is fine, if you are looking to really get in deep into multithreading, also get Moving to VB.NET, mentioned above. The authors finish up with brief intros to ADO.NET, ASP.NET, deployment and COM interop.

My overall opinion of this book? I think it is one of the BEST on VB.NET. I was dismayed about several things though. Even though the book is a "guide for experienced programmers", they still included the stupid obligatory chapters on how the do..while loop works and some other ones too. I would expect an innovative company (up to now) like Apress to dispense with this practice. The other thing that concerned me were a few misspellings here & there. That's probably because I reviewed a pre-production "review" copy. Hopefully, it will have been fixed by now.


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