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Programming Microsoft Visual C# 2005: The Base Class Library

Jump to the book's home page. This book covers the most important types in the .NET Framework Base Class Library (BCL) and a few new features of C# 2005, most notably generics and iterators. You can find thorough explanations on .NET data types, arrays and collections, streams, reflection, serialization, threading, PInvoke and COM interop. It does not cover high-level topics such as Windows Forms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET, though. You can download and print the following chapters: Chapter 5, “Arrays and Collections” and Chapter 10, “Custom Attributes”.

Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005: The Language

Jump to the book's home page. This 1000-page book is the new edition of Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003, possibly the best-selling book on Visual Basic .NET. The new book focuses only on the VB language and the .NET Base Class Library (BCL). It covers both old and new keywords as well as topics such as .NET data types, arrays and collections, streams, reflection, serialization, threading, PInvoke and COM interop. It does not cover high-level topics such as Windows Forms, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET, though. There are many textbooks that focus on that stuff, and you might want to buy one of those anyway. This book isn't just a VB 2005 reference. More precisely, in addition to being a complete reference book, it is a digest of the many programming techniques that you can implement by leveraging the features of the language and the .NET Framework 2.0, including generics, threads, reflection, custom attributes, serialization, delegate, regular expressions, and more. All descriptions aim to writing faster and more robust code. I looked hard for a similar book on the market before writing this one. I believe I finally wrote a book that does VB justice.

Unlike most other VB books, Programming Visual Basic 2005: The Language covers Visual Studio 2005 and how to take advantage of its many editing and testing features. The book includes two long chapters (112 pages in total) which covers basic and advanced topics, including macro creation, unit testing (with Team Systems), debugging techniques, and more. I have never found a language book that focuses on productivity inside the IDE and I hope this new book fills this gap.

Many readers asked why this book is different from previous editions and which topics the book covers precisely. All the answers are in the Introduction and the Table of contents. You can also download and print the following chapters: Chapter 11, “Generics” and Chapter 18, “Reflection”.

Read readers' reviews and buy from Amazon at 37% off ($37.79 instead of $59.99).

Practical Guidelines and Best Practices for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Visual C# Developers

Jump to the book's home page. I wrote this book with Giuseppe Dimauro, my partner and cofounder of Code Architects Srl and MSDN Regional Director for Italy. The book is a collection of over 700 coding guidelines, expert tips, and best practices that cover virtually every facet of .NET programming, from languages to Windows Forms and ASP.NET programming, including things such as memory optimization, arrays and collections, n-tier applications with remoting, Web services, and serviced components. For each rule we provide a sample in VB.NET and C# and an in-depth explanation of exceptions and alternatives, such as when applying the rule would be inappropriate. Emphasis is given to robustness, security, good design, code reusability, performance and conciseness. Most of these guidelines are based on technical articles by Microsoft gurus, filtered by our 20+ years of expertise in the programming battlefield. This is why we insisted to include the word practical guidelines in the title.

The crucial concept behind this book is that we don’t want to convince our peers programmers that our guidelines are the best guidelines around. Instead, we want to draw readers’ attention on the importance of guidelines and we propose our own rule to manage the most common cases and avoid the most common programming mistakes. As far as we know, this book is the first comprehensive attempt to create a coherent set of coding rules for the .NET Framework.

You can learn more about the approach we used in this book by reading our Introduction, the great foreword by John Robbins, and the complete list of all guidelines as reported in the Table of Contents. Or you can download and print the following sample chapters: Chapter 6, “Types”, Chapter 23, “Memory Usage”, and Chapter 31, “Serviced Components.”

The complete source code is available to registered users.

This book has been translated to Russian and local English for India. We also published an Italian version, even though with a different title.

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Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003

Jump to the book's home page. This book is a major update to my first VB.NET book, released in 2002 (see below). It updates all the chapters to .NET 1.1 and VB.NET 2003 and adds five new chapters on PInvoke and COM Interop, Serviced components (COM+), Remoting, Security, and Internet programming. It includes many new or improved examples on language features (shift operators, event overriding) and .NET Framework base classes (weak references, string optimizations, regular expressions). The new sections add about 250 pages to the previous edition, yet this book is “only” 1400 pages, because Microsoft Press finally decided to use a more compact page frame to save space. If you are a reader of the 2002 edition, please download a Word doc that summarizes all the additions and changes from the first edition, so that you don’t have to compare the two editions page by page to find out what has been added or improved. Unlike the 2002 edition, this book comes with the complete e-book in searchable format, plus another e-book containing the electronic version of Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6.

Read sample Chapter 18, “Custom Windows Forms Controls” and the complete Table of Contents. As of this writing, this book has no errata file.

Programming Microsoft Visual Basic .NET

Jump to the book's home page. This 1600-page book is probably the thickest book ever published by Microsoft Press, and can be easily considered the single most complete reference on the Visual Basic .NET language and of many areas of the .NET Framework, including reflection, threading, Windows Forms, ADO.NET, Web Forms, and Web Services. In addition to being a complete reference, the book illustrates many nonobvious programming techniques, including advanced optimization techniques related to memory management, database programming, and Web programming. The book highlights the many challenges that you can meet when migrating from Visual Basic 6 to the .NET Framework platform, including both problems related to the language and those related to the environment (COM vs. .NET). All sections related to the transition from VB6 are clearly labeled with an icon, thus developers coming from another language can skip them.

The underlying idea is that you must learn the entire .NET Framework - including its low-level secrets - in order to master higher-level areas such as Windows Forms and ASP.NET. And only a book written by a single author in a unified writing and programming style can provide you with such knowledge. This approach has pleased many readers, and this book (and its 2003 edition) has been for over two years at (or near) the top of the Visual Basic best-selling books in Amazon, and in the 10 top-sellers among all the .NET Framework books. I heard that it has been the second best-selling Microsoft Press book in the .NET programming category, after Richter’s Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming (see below). It has been translated to Italian, French, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional) and local English-language versions in China and India.

The book includes a companion CD-ROM with all the code samples, many reusable classes, and the e-book of my Programming Visual Basic 6 book, which I sometime reference in text, especially for its SQL language and HTML tutorials.

Read sample Chapter 12, “Regular Expressions”, Chapter 21, “ADO.NET in Disconnected Mode”, the complete Table of Contents, and the list of found errata

Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET

Jump to the book's home page. This book is the VB.NET version of Jeffrey Richter’s Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming, a book that all .NET developers should have on their desktops. It covers virtually every low-level detail in the .NET Framework, including types, methods, memory management, and error handling. In year 2002 this book has been the absolute top seller in Amazon’s “Computer and Internet” category and the best selling Microsoft Press book in the .NET programming category. All the code samples in the book were in C#, so Jeffrey decided he wanted to publish a VB.NET version, and I gave him a hand in translating the code and adapting the text. In addition to the mere translation of samples and text, the book contains also a few original sections that were missing in the C# edition, for example to illustrate how VB.NET deals with modules and events.

This book has been translated to Italian, Korean, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional) and local English-language in China.

Read sample Chapter 9, “Methods”, and the complete Table of Contents

Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 6

Jump to the book's home page. In 1998 I proposed Microsoft Press a book project based on object-oriented programming in VB6. They accepted the proposal, but asked to write a book with a wider scope, because they still didn’t have a VB book in the Programming series. I planned to devote 6 months to this book, but in the end it took me about 9 months, plus one month to supervise the Italian translation. The result is a 1200-page book that many developers use to consider “The Visual Basic Bible.” The book starts with the basics of VB programming and then dives into more complex topics, including database programming with ADO (including esoteric techniques based on disconnected and hierarchical recordsets), Windows API functions, DHTML applications, and Web classes. It contains tons of optimization tips and a complete tutorial on how to use objects in your applications, with a thorough explanation of advanced programming techniques.

In spite of the huge amount of time I spent on this title, it was the most intelligent decision in my entire career, as this book has sold around 150,000 copies all over the world, 60,000 of which only in Italy. In addition to Italian, it has been translated to Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Chinese (simplified, China), Chinese (traditional, Taiwan) and local English-language version in India. It has been adopted in many schools and universities, has been reprinted many times, and - unbelievably! - as of this writing (November 2005) it continues to sell more than many .NET books.

The companion CD contains all the code samples, a library of over 150 reusable functions and classes, and the e-book version of the textbook in searchable format.

Read Chapter 6, “Classes and Objects”, Appendix A, “Windows API Functions”, the complete Table of Contents, the list of found errata and a Word doc that illustrates changes from VB5 to VB6

Read readers' comments (about 90 reviews, 4.5 stars on the average) and buy on Amazon at 40% off.