Visual Basic Free Ebook Download : Introducing Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 for Developers.pdf

Language Enhancements for Visual Basic 2005

When building applications with Visual Basic 6, you have access to the Visual Basic Run time, a wide variety of COM objects, and a Win32 API for whichever version of the Microsoft Windows operating system you're running on. The first versions of the .NET Framework unified much of this functionality into a single mammoth set of classes known as the Base Class Library. Within the Base Class Library, there are classes to support accessing information about the underlying operating system. There are classes that allow you to easily access information about the hardware on the machine. There are also classes that allow you to easily communicate across the network between different applications, encrypt data, provide access to the registry, and more.

Understanding the Base Class Library, and the wealth of functionality it offers, is important if you want to become a competent .NET developer. A lack of knowledge about the Base Class Library can cause developers to reinvent the wheel and construct classes that already exist. In some cases, the functionality provided by the .NET Framework is so hidden or obscured by the size of the .NET Framework that things are overlooked. Numerous articles have been written that include a home-brewed algorithm to support actions that you could perform simply by knowing about such Framework classes as Path or PasswordDeriveBytes. In fact, many people will tell you that learning .NET isn't so much about learning Visual Basic .NET or C#, but that it is really about learning the Base Class Library.

However, learning the Base Class Library is also a mammoth challenge, simply because it is so large. The classes that are used every day are mixed in with other classes that you might never need. ........more

To make the common classes in the .NET Framework more discoverable, Visual Basic 2005 now provides a "speed dial" called The My Object. By using The My Object, you have the ability to easily access computer, application, and user information, as well as obtain access to Web services and forms. It is important to understand that The My Object is accessible to you only when writing Visual Basic .NET applications and is not directly available to you when using C#.

It is important to note that The My Object goes beyond being a simple speed dial. In some cases, the classes in The My Object provide more functionality than you easily find by simply searching through the various namespaces that make up the Base Class Library. For example, the Folder object provides additional properties, such as Drive, that are not available on the System.IO.DirectoryInfo class. The My Object also forced Microsoft to think of the computer, application, and user as complete entities and ask "What should you be able to do with a computer?" The result was methods such as My.Computer.Network.Ping. You will now find that functionality previously available only by calling into COM libraries, or the Win32 API, are now easily accessible and discoverable through The My Object.Top