Start-to-Finish Visual Basic 2005: Learn Visual Basic 2005 as You Design and Develop a Complete Application

Chapter 1. Introducing .NET Welcome to .NET! I might as well have said, quot;Welcome to the Solar System,quot; because like the solar system, .NET is huge. And it's complex. And it's filled with black holes and other th...

Chapter 2. Introducing Visual Basic It was a dark and stormy night. Hector gazed wearily through his bloodshot eyes, through the black-rimmed corrective lenses, and through the haze of the fluorescent overhead lights at...

Chapter 3. Introducing the Project You're sitting in your office, surfing the . . . I mean, reading up on the latest technology issues most pressing to software developers. You're minding your own business, when boom, s...

Chapter 4. Designing the Database Data. Databases. It just kind of makes sense. If you have data, you need to put it somewhere. And what better place to put it than in a quot;dataquot; base? Just to make sure I had all...

Chapter 5. .NET Assemblies The mere mention of the word quot;assemblyquot; takes me back to my days as a high school freshman. The assembly was actually held in the school gym, with 2000 screaming adolescents filling th...

Chapter 6. Data and Data Types Data is a funny wordalthough not as funny as datum. Our minds are filled with data: the useful and useless trivia that clogs thought; the millions of memories that keep superficial convers...

Chapter 7. Windows Forms William Shakespeare wrote, quot;All the world's a form, and all the controls and labels merely players: They have their exit events and their entrance events; and one control in its time exposes...

Chapter 8. Classes and Inheritance How many .NET programmers does it take to change a light bulb? Nonethey call a method on the light bulb object, and it changes itself. Ha, ha, ha! That's funny, but only if you underst...

Chapter 9. Error Processing Debugging and error processing are two of the most essential programming activities you will ever perform. There are three absolutes in life: death, taxes, and software bugs. Even in a relati...

Chapter 10. ADO.NET If you have ever read any programming books related to Microsoft development technologies, then you have already read a chapter just like this one. It seems that every Windows programming book has an...

Chapter 11. Security Secrets are funny things. With billions of people on the planet, there is no shortage of really interesting events and stories, but none of them will hold our interest if there is a secret to be dis...

Chapter 12. Operator Overloading Do you ever wish you could do things beyond what people were designed to do? Like flying. We all dream about it, but we can't do it without several hundred pounds of jet fuel. Or what ab...

Chapter 13. XML Because computers are computers and people are people, they generally have different requirements when it comes to getting their data into a usable format. XML is an attempt to arrange data in a structur...

Chapter 14. Application Settings Over seven score years ago, President Abraham Lincoln began his famous Gettysburg Address with, quot;Four score and seven years ago....quot; Why this poetic reference to the founding of...

Chapter 15. Files and Directories Software development in the 21st century has really turned programmers into a bunch of softies (no pun intended). In the old days of computers, developers had to solder programs into th...

Chapter 16. Generics When I was in high school, my family sometimes shopped at a local grocery warehouse named Fedmart. Signs on the window clearly stated that there was quot;no connection between Fedmart and the Federa...

Chapter 17. GDI+ A picture is worth a thousand wordsor several thousand lines of source code, if you're generating a bitmap image of it. Writing code to manipulate images of varying color depths, or to trace out multi-l...

Chapter 18. Localization and Globalization Bienvenue agrave; chapitre dix-huit! My apologies to those of you who don't speak Frenchand also to those who actually do. I took four full years of the language in high school...

Chapter 19. Printing When Microsoft released its original version of MS-DOS, it included printing features that supported the then-available printers: chisel and stone. Fortunately, printing has come a long way since th...

Chapter 20. Reporting For the business application developer, reports are a fact of life. You may want to spend your time developing cool user interfaces or figuring out the core algorithms used in Generally Accepted Ac...

Chapter 21. Licensing Your Application Proper .NET content licensing can mean the difference between marketplace dominance and financial bankruptcy. And I'm just talking about trying to understand the license agreement...

Chapter 22. Web Development When Sir Tim Berners-Lee (knighted in 2004!) invented the World Wide Web in 1989, it really wasn't a big deal. As the primary designer of HTTP and HTML, he certainly was no slouch. But most o...

Chapter 23. Adding Online Help If there's one thing I've learned in nearly 25 years of programming, it's that users often need some help to run software on their systems. Programmers need help too, but getting back to c...

Chapter 24. Deployment Although Aesop lived thousands of years ago, he has much to tell us about software development. His story of the boy who cried wolf is a perfect example. It concerns a young shepherd boy who trick...

Chapter 25. Project Complete You've done it! You've completed the Library Project and met with acclaim from users and fellow programmers alike. And you've also accomplished something that few thought was possible: You s...