Developer Fusion Review

Before even Beta 3 of Visual Studio.NET has been released, Wrox has already published Professional VB.NET. This book is essentially aimed at experienced VB developers wanting to make the move to VB.NET. As such, although this is Professional VB.NET, it focusses on the new features available to old VB 6 developers.

Professional VB.NET covers the features of VB.NET thoroughly, from a general introduction to the .NET Framework, through to advanced features such as threading and services (in 950 pages!). Part and parcle of Microsoft's new .NET Framework is the major differences from VB 6, which can make even experienced VB programmers quail. Fortunately, this book makes it clear what will and what won't work with VB.NET (it also includes an Appendix on the VB Compatibility Library which makes the process of porting existing code somewhat easier).

The downside of all these changes has meant that Professional VB.NET has had to spend longer explaining how to do things we could do in VB, but now have to do differently in VB.NET... which means that 'Professional' topics that usually feature in Wrox books are not quite as in-depth as usual. On the other hand, we still get an extensive introduction to the ideas behind the Common Language Runtime (the replacement for the VB 6 runtime DLL... and very different), Windows Forms, Error handling, ADO.NET, Web Forms, Web Controls, and deployment. We also have the opportunity to be introduced to topics that previously pure-VB developers would have no experience of; threading, inheritance, interfaces, and windows services.

The book has plenty of well-expained code examples, in true Wrox style, and although the large number of authors has resulted in slight inconsistencies. Any developer wanting to get ahead of the crowd on .NET should buy this book. The book covers topics in far more depth than VB.NET Programming did, and is a great help for anyone wanting to develop real-world applications in VB.NET. Developers who aren't particularly interested in .NET until it directly affects them may want to hold off for a little while until .NET is actually released.