Beginner's Guide to Visual Basic .NET Programming

The author assumes you have no experience in programming. The book starts with the installation of the required programming environment. Then, the simplest "Hello World" program is developed step by step. In the next three chapters (Chapters 4 to 6), Windows forms (the visual part of desktop programs) and their components are studied with practical examples. Screenshots and code snippets are clearly given in the book to guide the reader. After teaching the graphical user interface (GUI) design, VB.NET programming is covered in an organized manner in the following eight chapters (Chapters 7 to 14) with dozens of example projects. As the reader follows the development of the sample projects, he/she will learn designing user interfaces, connecting interface objects to code, developing efficient VB.NET code and generating standalone programs. Connecting to Access databases from our VB.NET programs for permanent data storage is explained in Chapter 15. In the last Chapter, a simple car racing game is developed in VB.NET.Chapters of the book and the contents of these chapters are as follows: Chapter 1. Introduction: General info on Visual Basic and .NET environment.Chapter 2. Setting up your development environment: Installing and configuring Visual Studio.Chapter 3. Test drive - the "Hello World" project: Creating a new Visual VB.NET project, adding and positioning a Label and building the project.Chapter 4. Form (GUI) elements: Containers, menus, dialog windows, components, controls, properties and events of controls.Chapter 5. Common controls: Using common controls like Buttons, TextBoxes and ProgressBars in our projects (a total of 21 commonly used controls are studied).Chapter 6. Menus, dialogs and containers: Utilizing various menu types, using dialog windows to take user input, file open/save operations and incorporating containers to organize the form layout.Chapter 7. Variables and constants: Organized VB.NET programming begins in this chapter. Declaring variables, variable types, type conversions and constants.Chapter 8. Conditional statements: Operators, various types of if-else structures and select-case statements.Chapter 9. Loops: The need for loops in our programs. Utilization of for, foreach, while and do-while loops. Break and continue statements.Chapter 10. Arrays and collections: Declaring arrays, using multidimensional arrays and array operations. Hashtable and ArrayList structures for storing multiple types of variables together.Chapter 11. Methods: Method declarations, scopes of methods, passing variables by value and by reference.Chapter 12. Classes and objects: The class-object concept. Declaring and using classes. Creating objects. Utilizing several constructor methods for flexibility.Chapter 13. Frequently used classes in VB.NET: Utilizing the methods of the String class, the StringBuilder class and the Math class.Chapter 14. Handling Errors: Preventing our programs from crashes in case of errors. Try-catch, try-catch-finally structures and the throw keyword.Chapter 15. Database connections using ADO.NET: Creating Access databases from scratch, reading and modifying database entries from our VB.NET programs.Chapter 16. Developing a simple 2D car racing game in Unity using VB.NET: Exporting the game as a standalone program.This book includes more than 500 figures and 300 code snippets that are used to explain VB.NET programming and GUI development concepts clearly. Full resolution colour figures and complete project files can be downloaded from the book's companion website: www.yamaclis.com/vbnet