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

For loops

A For loop is a control structure that allows you to execute a block of code repeatedly for a fixed number of times. The basic syntax for a For loop in VB is as follows:

For cntr As Integer = start To end Step stepValue
    'code to execute
Next

In this syntax, cntr is the loop variable that is used to control the loop. The loop will start with the value of start and end with the value of end, incrementing the variable by stepValue each iteration the loop executes. The stepValue is optional and defaults to 1 if not specified.

Here’s an example of VB.NET code that will loop over a range of numbers and prints each number to the console:

For x As Integer = 1 To 7
    Console.WriteLine(x)
Next

This code will assign the numbers 1 through 7 to the variable x and then print it to the console.

A For loop can also have a custom step value, for example:

For cntr As Integer = 1 To 20 Step 2
    ...