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

Storing data in a dictionary

Dictionaries, or associative arrays or hash maps, are widely used data structures in programming. Dictionaries provide a way to store and retrieve data using key-value pairs. The key is used to store and retrieve the related data. There are also methods to return the keys as a list that can be iterated over.

In VB.NET, dictionaries are represented by the Dictionary(Of TKey, TValue) class, which is part of the System.Collections.Generic namespace. Dictionaries provide a data structure that stores key-value pairs, allowing efficient lookup and retrieval of values based on their associated keys.

Here’s an example of how to use dictionaries in VB.NET:

Dim studGrades As New Dictionary(Of String, Integer)()
studGrades.Add("Seamus", 92)
studGrades.Add("Freya", 95)
studGrades.Add("Aspen", 89)
For Each pair As KeyValuePair(Of String, Integer) In studGrades
    Console.WriteLine(pair.Key & &quot...