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

Reading text from 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 read text from 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 ReadAllText and ReadlAllLines methods pull all the text from the file into a single variable. The difference between the two methods is that the second method pulls the data line by line into an array, while the first does not separate the input file lines:

Imports System.IO
Dim myFile As String = "C:\Path\File.txt"
Dim myText As String = File.ReadAllText(myFile)

In VB.NET, the StreamReader class allows you to read text from a file. First, you create a StreamReader instance, and then use its Read or ReadLine methods to read the text:

Imports System.IO...