Book Image

Visual Basic Quickstart Guide

By : Aspen Olmsted
Book Image

Visual Basic Quickstart Guide

By: Aspen Olmsted

Overview of this book

Whether you’re an absolute beginner or an experienced developer looking to learn the Visual Basic language, this book takes a hands-on approach to guide you through the process. From the very first chapters, you'll delve into writing programs, exploring core concepts such as data types, decision branching, and iteration. Additionally, you’ll get to grips with working with data structures, file I/O, and essential object-oriented principles like inheritance and polymorphism. This book goes beyond the basics to equip you with the skills to read and write code across the entire VB family, spanning VB Script, VBA, VB Classic, and VB.NET, enabling you to handle legacy code maintenance with ease. With clear explanations, practical examples, and hands-on exercises, this book empowers you to tackle real-world software development tasks, whether you're enhancing existing projects or embarking on new ones. It addresses common challenges like distinguishing between the variations of the VB programming language to help you choose the right one for your projects. Don't let VB's extensive legacy daunt you; embrace it with this comprehensive guide that equips you with practical, up-to-date coding skills to overcome the challenges presented by Visual Basic's rich history of over two decades.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Visual Basic Programming and Scripting
9
Part 2:Visual Basic Files and Data Structures
14
Part 3:Object-Oriented Visual Basic
20
Part 4:Server-Side Development

Writing test into files

We will continue to utilize the two different methods for VB.NET and older VB family members. For VB.NET, we will use the File class from the System.IO namespace to write text to files. For VBScript, VBA, and VB6, we will continue to use the FSO we used in the files and directories section.

The File class also provides two methods that make writing text to a file in a single line easy. The WriteAllText and AppendAllText methods allow you to send the parameter to overwrite or append the file:

Imports System.IO
Dim myFile As String = "C:\Path\File.txt"
File.WriteAllText(myFile, "This text overwrites the file")
File.AppendAllText(myFile, "This is appended text.")

In VB.NET, the StreamWriter class can also write text to a file. First, you create a StreamWriter instance, and then use its Write or WriteLine methods to write text:

Imports System.IO
Dim myFile As String = "C:\Path\File.txt"
Using writer As New StreamWriter...