Mastering Visual Basic .NET is the update to the best-selling Mastering Visual Basic 6, by Evangelos Petroutsos. Because of the enormous changes introduced by .NET, Petroutsos has rewritten his book from the ground up. In contrast to some other large VB.NET books, Petroutsos is the only author of the Mastering. For the reader, the benefit is a unified author voice and continuity in the examples, which is not found in many other big books on VB. And the examples are not trivial. Instead of using simplistic examples to demonstrate isolated points, Petroutsos shows actual applications and ties them together.

The book goes into highly specific detail about topics given short shrift in other books. For example, Petroutsos goes beyond showing you how to populate an array; he also shows how to save the array to a disk file. In the printing chapter, he doesn’t just show how to print a few lines of text; he shows how to print a text file (including the logic to break long lines), and how to print tabular data and bitmaps.

Master this massive programming language upgrade that raises Visual Basic functionality to the level of the .NET platform. Coverage includes all core topics—plus security, debugging, and helpful information on migrating existing Visual Basic projects to Visual Basic.NET.

Book Info
Coverage includes all core topics, plus security, debugging, and helpful information on migrating existing Visual Basic projects to Visual Basic .NET. Softcover.

The best recommendation for this book is the first sentence of the first chapter, "If you have never written a Visual Basic .NET Web Service before, you are in the right place." With a nod to tradition, the book starts with "Hello World" - as a Web Service! Using primarily the wizards and automatically generated code provided by VB.NET, they demonstrate that it's only the work of a few minutes to create a service that can be invoked to return "Hello World" as an XML encoded string using HTTP.

There's a lot of magic under the covers, but there's also a lot of instant gratification. To get you launched immediately. By chapter 3, you're off and running with SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. That's the great thing about this book. It takes off like a rocket.

In fact, after beginning from a standing start, the book has great chapters on how to debug and trace Web Services from both the point of view of the server and the client, security, scalability and performance, and maintaining state. The material is well written and presented, but if you don't already have some background in software, a lot of it might not be completely meaningful. The part of the book that deals with foundation software technology concludes with a chapter on the most likely partner for VB.NET in providing Web Services: Microsoft's SOAP SDK.

Learn how to turn data into solutions with SQL Server 2000, Visual Basic .NET, and XML. Find out the fastest ways to transform data into potent business solutions with this definitive guide for developers. You’ll get a fundamental grasp of SQL Server™ programming techniques for data access, data manipulation, and data definition with T-SQL, and you’ll learn how to make the most of the language enhancements in Visual Basic® .NET, the programming advances in the Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET integrated development environment, and the state-of-the-art technologies of the .NET framework, including ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and XML Web services. You also get in-depth coverage of SQL Server database security management, SQL Server Web releases, and features for interoperability between ADO.NET and XML. If you’re looking for expert insights on how to build powerful, secure solutions with SQL Server 2000 and Visual Basic .NET, this is the book for you. Coverage includes these topics:

• XML Web services
• SQL Server 2000 XML functionality
• XML data-processing techniques
• Class, event, and error-processing innovations
• Tables and data types
• Programming data access with T-SQL
• Programming views and stored procedures
• Programming user-defined functions and triggers
• SQL Server 2000 security
• Creating Microsoft Windows®–based applications with SQL Server 2000 and Visual Basic .NET
• Programming Windows solutions with ADO.NET
• Programming ASP.NET solutions

This book has been fully tested on and is compliant with the official release of NET.

Almost all applications have to deal with data access in some way or another. This book will teach you how to build Visual Basic .NET applications that make effective use of databases. Visual Basic .NET is the latest version of the most widely used programming language in the world, popular with professional developers and beginners alike.

Starting with a guide to the basic principles of database design, we then examine how to query databases and how to access their data - both in Windows applications and remotely using the Internet and Web Services. Every new concept is explained thoroughly with Try It Out examples, plenty of code samples, and end-of-chapter questions to test you.

This book covers:

- The basic principles of relational database design

- Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine

- Querying the database with the T-SQL language

- Visual Studio .NET and the Server Explorer

- ADO.NET and the DataSet

- Data binding, updating the database, and conflict resolution

- XML's role in ADO.NET

- Accessing data with ASP.NET and Web Services