E-Books : The Complete Reference VISUAL BASIC .NET


This book started over a burger in a downtown Seattle café in late 2001. I was reflecting with my editor, Ann Sellers, about the discussions we had just had with the Microsoft .NET protagonists. We came to the conclusion that if Microsoft could pull off the .NET Framework, it would change software development at least for the Windows operating systems forever. This book’s publication is testimony to the achievement that is the .NET Framework and, in particular, Visual Basic .NET.

Visual Basic .NET and the .NET Framework and I go back almost five years when I was an aggressive Java programmer (of course, the framework was just a nameless, mysterious OO project at MS then). While I worked with several flavors of Java, all my customers needed stuff for the Windows platform. Visual J++ was my tool of choice (especially after programming Delphi for a few years). Then, delegates (those so−called object−oriented function pointers) and other things that Microsoft was doing with Java hit a nerve center at the house of Sun. The result was the Intifada between the two software makers that stopped VJ++ in its tracks.

For the next couple of years the Visual J++ Web site at Microsoft.com and “VJ” remained unchanged. The Java world moved on with newer stuff from Sun, and VJ and Windows Foundation Classes (WFC) languished in the lawsuits. I and tens of thousands of Windows VJ programmers lost a lot of faith in the software development business.

Many of us felt passionate enough, and were hurt enough, to get some answers directly from Microsoft on where they were heading. At the end of 1998 I was told “if you can wait for our new object−oriented software to arrive you will really be pleased.” My reply to that was “What should I do in the meantime?” “Go and develop with Visual Basic and we’ll call you when it’s ready.” Not knowing what they were baking, I took their advice, and that’s exactly what I did for the next few years. I went on to use VB for a number of major projects.

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