Book excerpts:

With the release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft is aiming more for developers productivity. Efforts have been focused on building an integrated development environment (IDE), class library, and language suite that makes it as easy as possible to build and deploy applications.

It is obvious by skimming this book, that Microsoft has looked at all aspects of coding -- including the writing of the code itself, debugging, and deployment -- and really examined how it could streamline each of these experiences. The enhancements are far reaching and include changes to the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET language itself, improvements to the IDE, simplification of data access and display, changes that increase developer productivity when constructing professional user interfaces, addition of a significant number of new classes to the framework to reduce the amount of code that the reader write, and an increase in the power and simplicity of deployment. This book will examine each of these areas in depth. In addition, while this book focuses on building desktop applications, most developers are doing at least some Web development. For this reason, Chapter 6, "Building Web Applications," covers some of the most significant changes to ASP.NET.

This introduction book briefly covers these topics and points the reader to the specific chapter where they can get more in-depth information. The reader can read this book from cover to cover or skip to the chapters of most interest to them.

Intended Audience

This book is for Visual Basic developers. Visual Basic 6 developers should begin with Chapter 1, "Microsoft .NET Framework Primer for the Visual Basic Developer," which will bring them up to speed on development for the .NET Framework. For .NET developers, they can skip Chapter 1 and jump right into Chapter 2, "Language Enhancements for Visual Basic 2005."

Reviews:

Amazon.com

:( "I must say that this book is one of worst I have ever seen. It doesn't teach you anything you cannot find out your self after playing with vb for a week."

:( "The book has little value except as an error filled sales brochure for nonprogrammers."

:| "This book did not teach me very much more than articles that I read on MSDN or what I learned by myself using VB 2005 beta."