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Build a Program Now
Graeme Williams writes "My experience with Visual Studio was several years ago, and limited to a support role. My only serious programming experience was more than twenty years ago, so I'm the kind of hobbyist programmer that Visual Basic 2005 Express and this book is aimed at. Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! doesn't attempt to teach you programming in general or Visual Basic in particular. It's focused on introducing the features of the Express Edition of Visual Basic 2005. I think this focus serves the book and the reader very well." Read on for the rest of Graeme's review.
Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!
author
Patrice Pelland
pages
xi + 209
publisher
Microsoft Press
rating
9
reviewer
Graeme Williams
ISBN
0-7356-2213-2
summary
An excellent introduction to Microsoft's new Visual Basic 2005 Express programming system
At the moment, the book is only available in PDF form as a free download from Microsoft when you register Visual Basic 2005 Express. According to Barnes & Noble, it will also be available as a paperback some time this month. The paperback will include a CD with both Visual Basic 2005 Express and SQL Server 2005 Express. This review is based on the PDF.
The PDF is an inconvenient form for an ebook. It's protected so that you can't create your own bookmarks, and Microsoft doesn't provide any, and there are no clickable links -- in the table of contents, for example. There's a menu item for find, but the text doesn't seemed to be stored as text, so find doesn't actually find anything.
The book starts off with brief descriptions of .NET, object-oriented programming and the new features in Visual Basic 2005 Express. I guess it makes sense as a general introduction, and you can skip it if you like. It's certainly not a thorough explanation of object-oriented programming, but it's enough to let someone know that there's more to learn.
The next chapter leads you through installing the software. This is of doubtful value, since it basically advises you to stay with the defaults, which you almost certainly could have done on your own. If you have a problem, the book points you to some online resources, but that's all. I had a problem because my 'My Documents' folder is on a server, and this was enough to break the default security settings. The installation offers to install SQL Server 2005 Express, but neither the installation nor the book tells you that this will leave SQL Server running all the time.
Once the software is installed, you can start programming. The examples in the book are great. Starting with a simple console application to add two numbers might seem silly, but it makes sense in Visual Basic 2005 because you can't just start typing – you have to start somewhere in particular, and you need to know how to do that. Following that, you build a Windows application to add two numbers, a web browser, a database application, and an application that retrieves data from a web service. Each example builds nicely on the one before, and they're functional enough to be useful in their own right.
As important as the examples is what you learn along the way about the tools that make up the Visual Basic 2005 system. The book shows how simple it is to use the built-in components in Visual Basic 2005 to add features and functions to your application including forms, buttons, menus, toolbars, a splash screen, an about box, web services and database connections. This is where the book really shines. It shows you very clearly how to take advantage of the time (and work) saving features of the system.
The book is pretty good at explaining how to design a form. Form design was just awful in previous versions of Visual Basic, but the book clearly explains the new features that make it a little easier. The system is still not perfect – you can't automatically create three equally spaced textboxes (input fields), for example – but that's not the fault of this book.
The book also does a good job explaining the mechanics of starting a project, building applications and libraries, debugging, and "publishing" your application. "Publishing" is what Microsoft calls the process of turning your completed program into an installer which anyone can run to install your program. There's also an excellent introduction to database tables and how to create and use them within the system.
The graphic design in the book could be better. Each step in the instructions is indicated by a large numbered green bullet, which works well when there are only a few steps on a page, but you can easily get lost when one page has ten bullets and five tables. Also, you spend a considerable amount of time setting object properties. The value for each property is shown in a table, but sometimes a single table will include more than one object and sometimes it won't, which can be confusing. Finally, the screenshots aren't very clear. These may seem like quibbles, but an introductory book has a responsibility to be as clear as possible, and then some.
As you work through the examples in the book, you can really feel yourself gaining momentum. The flip-side of this is that as you go through the book, you get less and less explanation for larger and larger chunks of code. The largest single piece of code is 56 lines long. In context, it's presented clearly enough that it's still easy to digest. One way of measuring the success of an introductory book like this is whether it gives you the confidence to keep going on your own, and I think this book does just that.
But what if you're new to programming? If you're an absolute beginner, this book won't teach you how to program in Visual Basic. For example, the book never mentions structures or recursion. You can't do any serious programming just with what you'll learn about programming from this book, but that's not its purpose. The instructions in this book ARE clear enough that you'll be able to follow along, but if you want to get the most out of this book you'll have to spend some extra time working through the examples and with learning the language, even if it's only via the online help.
On the other hand, I don't think you can know so much that this book won't be very useful. Microsoft in its wisdom changes terminology regularly (toolbar is now toolstrip??) and there are many new features in this version of Visual Basic, so it's a good idea to hire a guide.
Depending on your level of experience, you may need other resources to learn everything you want to about programming in Visual Basic 2005, but this is a great place to start."
You can purchase Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
At the moment, the book is only available in PDF form as a free download from Microsoft when you register Visual Basic 2005 Express. According to Barnes & Noble, it will also be available as a paperback some time this month. The paperback will include a CD with both Visual Basic 2005 Express and SQL Server 2005 Express. This review is based on the PDF.
The PDF is an inconvenient form for an ebook. It's protected so that you can't create your own bookmarks, and Microsoft doesn't provide any, and there are no clickable links -- in the table of contents, for example. There's a menu item for find, but the text doesn't seemed to be stored as text, so find doesn't actually find anything.
The book starts off with brief descriptions of .NET, object-oriented programming and the new features in Visual Basic 2005 Express. I guess it makes sense as a general introduction, and you can skip it if you like. It's certainly not a thorough explanation of object-oriented programming, but it's enough to let someone know that there's more to learn.
The next chapter leads you through installing the software. This is of doubtful value, since it basically advises you to stay with the defaults, which you almost certainly could have done on your own. If you have a problem, the book points you to some online resources, but that's all. I had a problem because my 'My Documents' folder is on a server, and this was enough to break the default security settings. The installation offers to install SQL Server 2005 Express, but neither the installation nor the book tells you that this will leave SQL Server running all the time.
Once the software is installed, you can start programming. The examples in the book are great. Starting with a simple console application to add two numbers might seem silly, but it makes sense in Visual Basic 2005 because you can't just start typing – you have to start somewhere in particular, and you need to know how to do that. Following that, you build a Windows application to add two numbers, a web browser, a database application, and an application that retrieves data from a web service. Each example builds nicely on the one before, and they're functional enough to be useful in their own right.
As important as the examples is what you learn along the way about the tools that make up the Visual Basic 2005 system. The book shows how simple it is to use the built-in components in Visual Basic 2005 to add features and functions to your application including forms, buttons, menus, toolbars, a splash screen, an about box, web services and database connections. This is where the book really shines. It shows you very clearly how to take advantage of the time (and work) saving features of the system.
The book is pretty good at explaining how to design a form. Form design was just awful in previous versions of Visual Basic, but the book clearly explains the new features that make it a little easier. The system is still not perfect – you can't automatically create three equally spaced textboxes (input fields), for example – but that's not the fault of this book.
The book also does a good job explaining the mechanics of starting a project, building applications and libraries, debugging, and "publishing" your application. "Publishing" is what Microsoft calls the process of turning your completed program into an installer which anyone can run to install your program. There's also an excellent introduction to database tables and how to create and use them within the system.
The graphic design in the book could be better. Each step in the instructions is indicated by a large numbered green bullet, which works well when there are only a few steps on a page, but you can easily get lost when one page has ten bullets and five tables. Also, you spend a considerable amount of time setting object properties. The value for each property is shown in a table, but sometimes a single table will include more than one object and sometimes it won't, which can be confusing. Finally, the screenshots aren't very clear. These may seem like quibbles, but an introductory book has a responsibility to be as clear as possible, and then some.
As you work through the examples in the book, you can really feel yourself gaining momentum. The flip-side of this is that as you go through the book, you get less and less explanation for larger and larger chunks of code. The largest single piece of code is 56 lines long. In context, it's presented clearly enough that it's still easy to digest. One way of measuring the success of an introductory book like this is whether it gives you the confidence to keep going on your own, and I think this book does just that.
But what if you're new to programming? If you're an absolute beginner, this book won't teach you how to program in Visual Basic. For example, the book never mentions structures or recursion. You can't do any serious programming just with what you'll learn about programming from this book, but that's not its purpose. The instructions in this book ARE clear enough that you'll be able to follow along, but if you want to get the most out of this book you'll have to spend some extra time working through the examples and with learning the language, even if it's only via the online help.
On the other hand, I don't think you can know so much that this book won't be very useful. Microsoft in its wisdom changes terminology regularly (toolbar is now toolstrip??) and there are many new features in this version of Visual Basic, so it's a good idea to hire a guide.
Depending on your level of experience, you may need other resources to learn everything you want to about programming in Visual Basic 2005, but this is a great place to start."
You can purchase Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Although severely crippled when compared to the enterprise edition, Microsoft's express edition of their Visual Studio products are actually decent. You can get basic programs coded in Express without a lot of the overhead (or features) of the professional editions.
Book Title: Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now!
From Review: If you're an absolute beginner, this book won't teach you how to program in Visual Basic.
Brilliant!
I had high expectations when I read this book, and I'm pleased to say that I was more than satisfied. My Visual Studio "Hello World" program ROCKS!
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
Everyone has to learn somewhere, although if you are serious, VisualBasic is not the place to start. In my experience, the typical VisualBasic developer is just that. A good developer needs to understand concepts outside of the frame of wizards and such. Probably one of the biggest flaws in VisualStudio in general. MS loves wizards.
Saying "serious programming" in the same sentence as "Visual Basic" makes the Baby Jeebus cry.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
Afterall, I'm not going to be around to maintain it or be responsible for its crappiness.
With GUI:
;)
echo "alert('Hello world');" >hello.html
firefox hello.html
(9 seconds
10 Home
20 Print "What is the password: "
30 Get A$
40 If A$ = "b" then goto 70
50 Print "Wrong!"
60 Goto 20
70 Print "Right"
80 End
Now compare that kind of linear logic to a Java program with classes and { () and all that jazz. I remember when starting Java, thinking why do I need 3 different classes imported just to do a simple hello world? VB was no different, they had forms where you needed to drag and drop control boxes, and the like. Very little is straight forward, where a user/programmer could figure out the logic without a teacher/tutor.
I wonder how much more difficult the learning curve is? Maybe the programs will be better, and the programmers more skilled, but there was an element of fun in a language that is so simple a 7 year old can write his own code. Compare that to my college level Java class, which started 28 strong, and ended with only 16 students for the final exam.
What happened to a computer language that is intuitive and very easy, that anybody can learn?
An IT manager from WAMU who had been to MS campus to work his strategies to migrate to .NET told me that he was asked by MS's PM to migrate his applications to VC#. Though MS will continue to support VB but are softly asking managers to move towards VC#.
I don't know a lot about VB but MS seriously is in deep shit with VC especially the language syntax in 2005. Not many liked it. They also didn't support STL.NET which majority of the folks wanted. Is this something new?
VB Express (.img file)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=54764
VB Express (.iso file)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=57033
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Serious question. If you need to build a quick, simple, gui app for an end user (in a Windows environment), what's better? You can do a lot of useful stuff with a couple minutes worth of code.
Why not just start with QT and BAM! Instantly portable app ( well, not instant. I'm sure there are considerations you have to keep in mind if you want portable, but it's easier at least )?
I do light programming, nothing professional, so maybe I'm just not in on the loop on this one.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I at least KNOW that VB isn't exactly the best language on the planet. And knowing is half the battle!
/. and make up your own mind. I started with C, then C++, Java (and others I don't care much for, Cobol, Lisp, etc) then VB6 and now VB.Net. Professionally. Day in, day out. Guess what, it's not that bad.
How do you KNOW if you haven't had any exposure to it yet? Forget the moaning masses at
What happened to a computer language that is intuitive and very easy, that anybody can learn?
Security mostly. Scope is huge. Being able to define things that only exist within the curly braces is a blessing. Namespaces. Classes. Inheritance. All of that stuff that makes development such a joy. I'm not a computer scientist, I'm an aerospace engineer but I do simulation programming and all of these developments in object-oriented programming make my life so much easier. It is harder then when I was a kid and wrote my first programs in QBASIC, but man I'd much rather dig into a book and have to scratch my head a little learning C++ than go back to the old days...
-everphilski-
I eagerly await future books in the series such as:
Visual Studio 2005: Laying the Groundwork for Future Exploitation
Visual Studio 2005: A Catalyst for System Compromise
Visual Studio 2005: Pseudo-Security; It Makes You Feel Better
Visual Studio 2005: Allowing Users to Do Things You Never Intended
Teaching a person how to create an application WITHOUT programming skills is edging on insanity. Its like teaching a person how to gut the fish, without learning how to get the fish in the first place.
I found that an uncle of mine going through a VB course focused on this kind of approach, learning how to write an application without learning how to program. The problem is, anytime he came across a programming problem he had to solve, he phoned me up and asked me how the code should look. Without understanding the fundamentals of conditional statements, loops, and functions, few can really start to develop a useable application.
The fact is, if you want to do anything NOT mentioned in the book (i.e. anything the examples don't cover), your out of luck, because you will not have learned the necessary skills to find out how to do more then what the book mentions.
I would think this books sounds best for those familiar with programming, but NOT with the VB.Net 2005, for instance, those that are wondering what that new ToolStrip object does. It's designed as a refresher for those looking to understand what new features are and how to use them.
In any regard, VB is a good tool to be able to develop an application with MINIMAL programming skills, but I would be hard pressed to find someone actually wanting to design an application without some desire to understand how to do some basic programming. Anyone earning a paycheck by writing application swithout understanding how to program should seriously consider the morality of cashing his paycheck.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
What's wrong with VB or VB Express ? What's wrong with coding as a hobby and using these tools ?
Did you read the article where he says he's a hobbyist ? Why do you all need to rag on him, the book and program ?
In architechture schools you learn to build houses with cardboard first to understand the concepts, then you get to work with concrete.
Are you all so insecure about your jobs that you wouldn't encourage others to learn to write programs ? I don't see any other ideas from this audience, just hostility.
LouSir
please, please don't let your friends "program" with Visual Basic. Please?
Why not?
Not for experienced developers? VB.net is just another language that compiles down to MSIL, so you can do anything that C# does. Although I'm not too big a fan of the syntax, this language can do a ton. And how can you not like debuggers? They can save you a lot of time, and accomplish things that tracing never can. The new version of VB.net even lets you edit code while debugging (just like the old versions of VB)...how's that for cool?
Well, as a former VB user (don't flame me Slashdotters, I have redeemed myself by learning C, C++, and Java), VB itself isn't half bad. Need a GUI for an application? With Visual Basic, you are done in just ten minutes or so. Need to access a database? Just drag the control, change some variables, type some minimal code, and you're done. Visual Basic allows you to make simple programs very quickly. Now, Visual Basic becomes impractical for larger, more complex projects (such as high-end video games, office suites, real web browsers, and other more complex applications), but Visual Basic is very efficient for small, business applications (e.g., keeping payrolls, databases, etc.). It is so easy to use, a 10-year old can learn it within a few days (I learned VB when I was 10, after learning QBasic for a year, and I know of other programmers who done the same when they were 10. Note that my Visual Basic knowledge is limited to VB 6.0; I don't know anything about VB.NET, so things might have changed).
So, why do people criticize VB? Well, Unix people don't like it because it is Windows-only and proprietary. Computer scientists and "real programmers" don't like it it breaks their style of programming; while CS majors and "real programmers" think of projects in terms of algorithms and data structures and our languages support that way of thinking, VB users think of programs as GUIs and controls, and their language supports that. VB users are criticized because, on average, they tend to not know as much about computer science topics (such as algorithms, data structures, etc.) than their counterparts, and they tend to only know VB (as compared to many computer scientists and other programmers, who know multiple languages and multiple ways of doing things). There is a culture clash between VB coders and other programmers. Finally, there is some hostility from Unix users who had some experience with badly-made $29.99 shareware Windows applications written in Visual Basic, and now resent VB and VB coders.
VB is perfectly fine for the projects that it was designed for: GUI wrappers, database accessors, business applications, and other small GUI applications. VB is quickly outgrown, however, when dealing with much larger problems, and if you want portability, forget it. Just use the right tool for the job.
Visual Basic is the fastest way I know to make a program that looks good, but doesn't work.
This space intentionally left blank.
Seems every time a news item about VB comes out, we get the usual I hate VB because, or VB is not a real language, or Real Programmers Sneer at VB, or you can't learn programming in VB.
/. posters complain about the editors who dups news items...)
Give it a break!
As an MCT I taught Visual Basic from 3.0 to 6.0 to employees at a software company. it was a fundamentals class that focused first and foremsot on *concepts of programming* (gasp). Conditions, itterations, statments, structure flow, variable scope all hammered in before we got to anything to do with Objects/controls. I used the ease of VB to make learning fun, but always was the focus on the foundations of programming.
Funny thing, my next class was Objects in VB and again we designed classes outside of the language before using the tool VB to help build a Class. Had I tried that in Java or c++ then the "basic" concepts would be lost in the detail of just getting programs to compile. VB may not be 100% OO, but it is a god platform to show the basics.
Just because something is easy to use does not make it a bad tool. A hammer is a simple tool that in the right hands can build a house.
For those who Hate VB, why? What has it done to you? Call your mother a name? date your sister? Do you hate Visual Basic, or Microsoft in general. hate is such a strong emotion against a language that has done nothing more then provide a means for some to learn, others to earn. I hate java....I hate C++...nope, I can't feel it. Can't even come close to hate of two languages that come to mind. I would most likley never code in either language, but mainly because I lack the skill, and the time to master. Such happens after 24 years of programming. I've written in VB, COBOL, RPG, FORTRAN, Pascal, and dabbled in RatFor, C, Java, and now XML. None I hate; not all I like. Now only two am I comfortable with, and yet, given a change (time mainly) I'd *love* to learn C#, or C++. or more of Java. Hate? If's a fine line between hate and love.
I've said this before, it's not the language, it's the programmer. If someone understands the basic fundamentals of programming then language *does not matter* for that person will apply their understanding of concepts to bring out the best in a language. The rest wil hack, patch, kludge, or slap strings of statements that resemble a program but in fact look like a Rube Goldberg monstrosity left for others to fix.
As a general rule, when I hear a so-called programmer utter the sentence " I hate ????? language" they either are not a good Programmer, they haven't tried to see the good in anything, or their brilliance limits their vision of other peoples lives.
(And
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
The fact that your "hobby" attatches more strings to your life than other people's "jobs"? Until you've made the *jump* from MS to an Open Source platform, you have no idea. You're like somebody who's lived in a little box all their lives and doesn't believe in the sky. Once you can look far back on your MS days, you'll wonder if there's that much difference between "programming" in Visual Basic and huffing glue. Sure, it's a hobby, and you're hurting no one but yourself...
You get a major Linux distro, and you have not one or five or ten but something on the order of twenty programming languages and the compilers and interpretters and tools appertaining thereto, available to you immediately - FULL STRENGTH! - ready to WRITE Microsoft Windows out of the box - not crippled until you buy the super-duper-pooper-deluxe enterprise "professional" edition - all for free, nothing to buy at all, and very little to download (the odd library or development package, also free). Now *that's* a good start to a hobby.
baa-ht visual b-b-baa-sic is b-b-aaa-ad
* Nonchalantly turns back around and continues eating Slashdot grass *
* Craps a Slashdot posting *
Part of the problem may be that VB enables people with not a lot of experience at program design in any language to generate these quick-and-dirty applications that morph into critical applications in some business that some person then has to maintain. I guess the ability to work with C++ is regarded as a kind of "union card." The C++ qualification weeds out a lot of people. But this idea of choice of language to control programming is not a new one: currently the idea is C++ as a kind of intelligence test; some 20 years ago the idea was forcing programming in Pascal as a kind of test for patience or perhaps obsessive/compulsive neatness as a qualification for good programming.
I also think there is some fault in Visual Basic itself. If you look over the GoF Design Patterns, Visual Basic is pretty much stuck on the Mediator Pattern, which may tend to flatten program structure and lead to spaghetti code.
The basic pattern in GUI programming is that you have a widget, say a button, that responds to user input, say the user clicking the button with a mouse. You then have some "business rules" or "program logic" that is supposed to be invoked in response to the button click. The Observer pattern states that you can register some Observer object with button object to be activated in response to clicks. The Mediator pattern states that if you have a collection of button objects, you register a single observer, the Mediator, with all of those buttons, to contain all of the "program logic."
In Visual Basic you have a form, and you place widgets on that form, and when something happens in those widgets, you have one or more functions for the main form object that respond to those events. Some of the widgets require a lot of hand holding -- they fire off a lot of events for a variety of conditions and the main form code has to figure out what to do in response. The consequence of this is that the main form can get complicated very quickly with numerous event functions and numerous state variables to keep track of what event got fired and which mode one is in.
In Java, you have these action listener and event listener interfaces that you can register with widgets that signal mouse clicks and other actions. You have the flexibility of having a separate listener object for each widget or having the main form Frame or JFrame object be the listener by implementing the listener interface. You have the design choice of having a flat hierarchy or of having a collection of objects respond to different events. Whether people programming Java are able to use this flexibility effectively is another matter, but Java programmers are not forced to stuffing all of the program logic into the main form Frame object.
For example, if you have a widget that fires a large number of events and requires specific responses to all of those events, and implementing a widget that way may be a way of make a widget very flexible and easy to customize, you could write a specific Java listener class to not only respond to all of those events but also to implement some filtering logic on those events. In Visual Basic, my understanding is that all of that filtering logic has to go into the main form and that there isn't a simple and obvious way to parcel off that logic to another object. It is for this reason that the language snobs consider that for all of its faults, Java is "industrial strength" while Visual Basic remains a "toy language."
Now there are language snobs who fault Java for not having closures, the ability to register functions with classes or objects on the fly, for a clunky way of inspecting an object for functions and function signatures called reflection, and so on. But the number of people who understand how to use those features effectively is more limited. There are a lot of people who know how to use objects effectively and are frustrated by VB 6 having a crippled object system.