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

The Visual Basic Family of Programming Languages

People have been programming Visual Basic for over 23 years. Microsoft has deployed Visual Basic in many different environments over the years, including Windows Desktop development with Classic Visual Basic and Visual Basic.NET Windows Forms. Visual Basic has also been used as a server-side programming language in Classic ASP and ASP.NET. Visual Basic for Applications has been used to embed Visual Basic in both Microsoft Office products along with many third-party products. Lastly, many scripts have been used to control specialized hardware or automate administrative tasks. You will walk away from this chapter with a strong foundation to meet your Visual Basic requirements.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

  • Visual Basic.NET Windows Forms
  • Visual Basic Classic
  • Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)
  • Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript)
  • Classic ASP
  • ASP.NET