Practical Standards for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET

Building on the popularity of this book's first edition, PRACTICAL STANDARDS FOR MICROSOFT VISUAL BASIC, the author shows developers and teams migrating to Visual Basic .NET how to save valuable time and resources-and writer faster, more manageable programs-by incorporating programming standards into Visual Basic .NET coding. Readers learn best practices for object-oriented programming, file operations, solution distribution, and more-with advice on how to apply these standards to their own projects.

User review
Excellent book, I have every VB.Net developer working for me follow it
At any one time I am typically supervising five or six .Net developers. For Web development, the two most obvious choices are C# and VB.Net. Every good developer I have met says C# is a better language. Nevertheless, in general I have my developers use VB.Net. Why? Because I can read VB and because of this book.

A book of standards is really really important. `Code Complete` by Steve McConnell is clearly the best book on the subject ever published. McConnell is simply in a different league. But McConnell's book is not oriented to any one language, and it helps to have a language specific book.

So after my developers read Code Complete, I have them read Practical Standards. It is an excellent and comprehensive book. About 98 percent of it I agree with. Even if you don't, it is clear that Foxall has carefully thought about his choices and is articulate in explaining why he prefers a certain approach.

I think every VB.Net development team should buy a copy for every developer, made them read it, and then make them follow it. Have regular code reviews and point out when they have deviated from these standards.

If you are managing a team of VB developers, and then are a few areas where you disagree with Foxall, then simply write a memo. `Follow Foxall except in the following cases, where you should do the following ,,.` I cannot imagine that one would not want to follow his standards almost all of the time.

I would rather go with C# but I am aware of no similar book. There are lots of good C# books but none that are just standards book. Why on earth does Microsoft Press not publish an equivalent book for C#.

[,,.]

User review
Instructor
I have used both the VB6 and VB.net versions in my classes. In fact I require this as a additional text for all my classes. I believe very strongly that Hungarian notation should be part of a program.

It sounds like these reviewers that don't like Hungarian notation program in a vacuum. It is alright if you program by yourself to through out notations but if you have ever been a code reviewer and had to try to figure out what datatype or control type was being used, you learn to appreciate good use of notation, any notation to decipher the code.

Also while self documenting code style is what you want to try to acheive, it is very important to have a comment that points out the intent of the structure is, not just that it is an if/then construct. Why is this here. It is important to make this decision.

I think James has done an excellent job with this book and I look forward to his next edition.

Dennis

User review
Very disappointing
This book might be good for a total novice, but (a) most of the advice in here will already be familiar to VB6 coders (b) some significant areas with major changes from VB6 are completely overlooked (i.e., database), and (c) though this is subjective, some of the advice seems completely wrong-headed (my particular beef: advising against procedure `fan-out`, which is one procedure calling many subprocedures. This is in direct contradiction to Martin Fowler's advice in Refactoring, and the key to writing self-commenting code - I'll trust Fowler over Foxall any day).

User review
Did you say VB.NET or VB6?
I bought this book, because I had the VB6 one and was wondering a similar material, but adapted to .NET. If fails short and it's just decorating my desk. The author keeps the same guidelines, for example it recommends using Hungarian when Microsoft guidelines says DO NOT USE IT (even though it's a Microsoft Press book!). Take a look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpgenref/html/cpconNETFrameworkDesignGuidelines.asp

Those guidelines are more PRACTICAL and useful than this book. And you know what? IT'S FREE!!!

User review
A Good Guide For All VB.NET Programmers
This is a good book for both the experienced and beginning Visual Basic .NET programmer.

The purpose of this book is not to show you how to write a program in VB.NET but to provide a style template on how you should write a program; not only for readability but also for maintainability. To that end Foxall provides many examples of `bad` programming practices and styles along with a suggested `good` one.

The whole argument about using Hungarian notation (HN) or not is really irreverent. The very fact that this book exists and is hopefully read by more than a handful of people means more consistency and more error-free code.

One of the things I appreciate in this book is the use of color (various shades of blue-green) to mark things like comments in code, section headers, etc.

Overall this book was an easy read and can easily be grasped by entry level VB.NET programmers and functional enough for more experienced programmers to reference.