Matthew MacDonald - Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Programmers Cookbook

Copyright 2003 Matthew MacDonald (All)

The Microsoft Visual Basic .NET language now spans more programming tools, concepts, and application programming interfaces (APIs) than ever before. With the Microsoft .NET Framework, your Visual Basic code can go to work in a Microsoft Windows service, a Web application, an XML Web service, a Windows client, or a remote component. It can use robust multithreading, manipulate relational data and XML, harness COM+ services, and more. With all this functionality comes a priceeven the most experienced developer can have trouble isolating a useful feature buried somewhere in the enormous .NET class library!

The Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Programmers Cookbook is designed to share some of the best practices, tips, and undocumented secrets that help programmers master all aspects of .NET. This book doesnt intend to replace the many excellent tutorials that describe .NET basics and explain the foundational concepts for programming various types of applications. Instead, this book aims to fill the knowledge gaps of a professional programmer. In other words, you shouldnt turn to this book to learn how to create your first multithreaded program. However, when you need a reference that can give you an at-a-glance look at several different asynchronous programming patterns and provide you with a recipe for deriving your own custom thread class, this book will be invaluable.

The best way to think of this book is as a cross between an "FAQ on steroids" and a library of templates that show best practices. It would be impossible to list all the useful snippets of code Ive come across as a .NET programmer (and even if I did, the resulting book would be too large and disorganized to be much help to anyone). Instead, this book includes recipes that respond to the questions developers ask again and again on message boards, discussion lists, at conferences, in my .NET courses, and in direct-to-author e-mails. One of the reasons that a book like this works so well is that developers do run into the same problems time and time again, and the right solutions are often universal.

This book not only focuses on how to do things, but also how to do them right . For example, its easy enough to create a custom Exception class, but developers wont necessarily know the recommended constructors they should include, or the steps they should take to make the exception serializable so that it can be thrown across application domains in a remoting scenario. Youll find a similar theme when using threads, implementing common design patterns in .NET code, or creating custom objects that support the standard interfaces for copying, cloning, and comparing.

Another difference with this book and many other .NET titles is that its relentlessly practical. Many books about .NET cover only what the .NET platform encompasses. They might describe its limitations, but they rarely go beyond them. This book, on the other hand, covers everything developers need to get their work accomplished, even if it stretches into an area where the .NET class library hasnt caught up yet. Here are some examples: