Microsoft’s ‘in-house’ languages(Visual Basic, C#,…) have undergone significant changes with each release of the Visual Studio IDE. The VB found in Visual Studio 2005 was completely different to the one I knew from my VB6 days…can O’Reilly’s Developer’s Notebook get me updated?
Matthew MacDonald starts off by looking at the IDE itself - what changed, and more importantly, what’s in it for me. Many of the hints given herein can be significant time-savers(e.g. the automatic documentation generation). After that, the book goes on to look at various new aspects of the Visual Basic language. VB6 coders like me will find great value in these chapters; as they omit what you already know.
Two chapters on Windows and Web applications follow. These are written in a ‘cook book’ style - if you need what’s described, read it and party. If not, reading the code anyways shows you interesting facets of VB2005(for example, did you know about the IsNot operator?).
A chapter on all kinds of data-related tasks is included - its style follows the chapters before it. Last but not least, a chapter on the .NET framework looks at interesting ‘miscellanea’ like code performance timing and deployment - while I still miss a recipe on the insanely tedious process of creating an installer for a .NET CF application; it made a great read nevertheless.
O’Reilly books traditionally are well-written and easy to read; I am happy to say that this one makes no difference. The paper used is of good quality, too…the unusual page design helps a lot when making notes:
In the end, Matthew MacDonald’s book makes a great ‘hint book’ showing a lot of cool ‘gems’ that a developer could otherwise miss easily. While it cannot replace a structured introduction to VB; the hints contained can be worth their price in gold. If you have 22$ spare, add the book to your next Amazon order!