Beginning Visual Basic 2015

Book Preface

Visual Basic 2015 is Microsoft’s latest version of the highly popular Visual Basic .NET programming language, one of the many languages supported in Visual Studio 2015. Visual Basic 2015’s strength lies in its ease of use and the speed at which you can create Windows Forms and Windows 8 applications, web applications, and mobile device applications.

In this book, we introduce you to programming with Visual Basic 2015 and show you how to create these types of applications and services. Along the way you’ll also learn about object-oriented techniques and learn how to create your own business objects and Windows controls.

Microsoft’s .NET Framework provides Visual Basic 2015 programmers with the capability to create full object-oriented programs, just like the ones created using C# or C++. The .NET Framework provides a set of base classes that are common to all programming languages in Visual Studio 2015, which provides you with the same capability to create object-oriented programs as a programmer using C# or C++.

This book will give you a thorough grounding in the basics of programming using Visual Basic 2015; from there the world is your oyster.

Who This Book Is For

This book is designed to teach you how to write useful programs in Visual Basic 2015 as quickly and easily as possible.

There are two kinds of beginners for whom this book is ideal:
➤➤ You’re a beginner to programming and you’ve chosen Visual Basic 2015 as the place to start. That’s a great choice! Visual Basic 2015 is not only easy to learn, it’s also fun to use and very powerful.
➤➤ You can program in another language but you’re a beginner to .NET programming. Again, you’ve made a great choice! Whether you’ve come from Fortran or Cobol, you’ll find that this book quickly gets you up to speed on what you need to know to get the most from Visual Basic 2015.

What This Book Covers

Visual Basic 2015 offers a great deal of functionality in both tools and language. No one book could ever cover Visual Basic 2015 in its entirety—you would need a library of books. What this book aims to do is to get you started as quickly and easily as possible. It shows you the roadmap, so to speak, of what there is and where to go. Once we’ve taught you the basics of creating working applications (creating the windows and controls, how your code should handle unexpected events, what object oriented programming is, how to use it in your applications, and so on) we’ll show you some of the areas you might want to try your hand at next:

➤➤ Chapters 1 through 8 provide an introduction to Visual Studio 2015 and Windows programming.

➤➤ Chapter 9 provides an introduction to application debugging and error handling.

➤➤ Chapter 10 provides an introduction to object-oriented programming and building objects.

➤➤ Chapter 11 provides an introduction to creating Windows Forms user controls.

➤➤ Chapters 12 and 13 provide an introduction to programming with databases and covers Structured Query Language, SQL Server, and ADO.NET.

➤➤ Chapter 14 provides an introduction to ASP.NET and shows you how to write applications for the web.

➤➤ Chapter 15 introduces you to deploying applications using ClickOnce technology.

➤➤ Chapter 16 show you how to build your first Windows 8 application and introduces you to design principles for touch interfaces.