Doing Objects in Visual Basic 2005

by Kurata, Deborah

• ISBN13: 9780321320490
• ISBN10: 0321320492
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-02-20
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Summary

The authoritative resource for exploiting the object-oriented features of Visual Basic .NET, written by a leading expert.

Author Biography

Deborah Kurata is cofounder of InStep Technologies Inc. (http://www. insteptech.com), a professional consulting firm that focuses on turning your business vision into reality using Microsoft .NET technologies. InStep provides premier software design, development, and consulting services to the most successful companies in Silicon Valley, the San Francisco Bay area, and other locations nationwide. You can reach InStep at 925-730-1000 or at [e-mail].

 

Deborah has more than 15 years of experience in architecting, designing, and developing successful applications. She has authored several books, including the Doing Objects in Visual Basic series (Sams), Best Kept Secrets in .NET (Apress), and Doing Web Development: Client-Side Techniques (Apress). She also writes for MSDN and CoDe magazine (http://www.code-magazine.com/).

 

Deborah speaks at .NET user groups all over the country as a member of the INETA Speaker’s Bureau (http://www.ineta.org/) and at conferences such as VSLive, DevDays, and TechEd. For her work in support of software development and software developers, she has been recognized with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. After a hard day of coding and taking care of her family, Deborah enjoys blowing stuff up (on the XBox, of course).

 

Deborah holds degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire and an MBA from the College of William and Mary.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xvii
Preface	p. xix
Introduction to OO in .NET	p. 1
Designing Software	p. 39
Building Projects	p. 99
Building the User Interface Layer	p. 151
Building the Business Logic Layer	p. 251
Class Tools and Techniques	p. 307
Binding the User Interface to the Business Objects	p. 357
Building the Data Access Layer	p. 439
Index	p. 503
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Preface Preface Welcome to the latest in the series ofDoing Objectsbooks. This series started in 1995 with Visual Basic 4.0, when VB could first do objects. At that time, little had been discussed about using object-oriented design and development techniques with Visual Basic. To help improve that situation, almost half of each book in the series was dedicated to helping developers think in object-oriented terms and design an object-oriented application. The other half presented a full-featured solution for building an object-oriented application. As with each of the other books in this series, this book is about designing and developing great applications for Visual Basic using object-oriented principles. However, today's Visual Basic developer is much more versed in design concepts, so only one chapter of this book is dedicated to design. The remaining chapters provide techniques for building an object-oriented applicationanda reusable application framework. Unlike other books that provide reference-type information and short examples with no context, this book presents each topic in a logical sequence, illustrating the techniques by designing and developing a full-featured application. This allows you to readily see how each technique fits into your development activities. This book also demonstrates how to build an application framework you can reuse in every application you build. With an application framework you can significantly increase your productivity and that of your team. This new edition of the book was completely rewritten to use the features of Visual Basic 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and the .NET Framework. It makes no assumptions about your experience with .NET. It provides tips for experienced .NET developers and those new to .NET. There are even some tips specifically for developers moving from VB6 to .NET. Why Do Objects? Everything in .NET is basically an object. You cannot really do anything in .NET without doing objects. But Visual Basic 2005 still allows you to create modules, and it provides default form instances. Thus, you can still pretend to code without objects. So why make the move to using object-oriented techniques in your Visual Basic applications? Objects help you think about an application in terms of real-world things, aiding in the design process. Objects define all their data and processing in one programming unit. All of the code having to do with customers is in one code file, all of the code having to do with products is in another code file, and so on. This makes it much easier to develop, test, and maintain your code and to manage the complexities of software development. It also simplifies multiprogrammer development. Objects allow for building an application framework with base form classes and base business object classes. Common code resides in these base classes and not within every form or code file. This can drastically reduce the amount of code you have to write, test, and maintain. Objects allow you to work with other high-productivity features in .NET, such as object binding. This book expands on these topics to help you know when, how, and why to do objects in Visual Basic 2005. Who Should Read This Book? The goal of most Visual Basic developers is to get the job done. You have existing code to maintain, enhancements to implement, and new applications to write--all with limited time and other resources. You need to be as productive as possible. Learning a new version of your programming language and development environment takes away from that productivity. So you need a way to learn the new tools and techniques as rapidly and efficiently as possible. This book is for developers who need to quickly learn the key features of Visual Basic 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and the .NET Framework and i