Visual Basic .NET Power Tools

This advanced book on Visual Basic .NET, one of the core components of Microsoft's upgrade to Visual Studio, provides a completely unique solution for experienced programmers. Detailed coverage of a broad set of high-level topics, complemented by thorough reusable code examples, makes Visual Basic .NET Power Tools an essential reference to shortcuts and solutions. From world-renowned, best-selling authors Evangelos Petroutsos and Richard Mansfield, this book addresses challenging topics such as regular expressions, .NET security classes, printing, ADO.NET, and managing deployment. Assuming that many readers are also experienced Visual Basic 6 programmers, the authors provide references to old VB 6 methods that help upgraders make a smooth transition.

User review
Much better than its title suggests
Note: There is something odd about Amazon's processing of technical reviews. People goofing off, or what? I submitted this a couple of days ago and it never appeared - perhaps this will be the lucky time. The only other time this happened was also with a computer-related review. Anyway, here goes,,,,

I haven't read every page of this 560-page book, but I've seen enough to make me want to give a really strong recommendation. If you are working with VB.Net at all, you probably need this book.

I say it's much better than its title, because to me, and I suspect to others, `Power Tools` suggests a bunch of handy add-ons - neat tricks, perhaps some useful utilities. That's not what this book is. It is a really thorough and well-written explanation of a host of absolutely key, fundamental topics in VB.Net.

For instance, it's got the best, most concise description of public and private key security, and RSA encryption, with clear, straightfoward `how-to's,` that I've ever seen. Also, the best and clearest description of middle-tier technology options, with comparisons betwen Web Services and .Net remoting, plus a good summary of COM+ and how to use existing COM+ components in .Net.

Other chapters cover a wide range of topics - queuing, XML, regular expressions, ADO.Net, Reflection, deployment, and more,,.Whatever the topic that is currently interesting or challenging you, you'll probably find it here.

In the Introduction, the reflections on Microsoft's clarity, or lack thereof, in documentation are often right to the point! And the whole issue of having a productivity language rewritten by exponents of a low-level, nitty-gritty approach is well covered. The two approaches to programming are very different, and in adding VB to the .Net family, much was gained but also quite a lot was lost that could have been kept - at the price, admittedly, of making VB able to do things that C# couldn't do! Don't tell me they couldn't have found a way to make things like user-defined types of arbitrary size, with fixed-length strings, and control arrays, translate into IL - they just didn't want to. The Power Tools authors don't use the term `language snobbery` but it comes inescapably to mind.

The new VB9 tries to make a few gestures in the direction of ease of use, such as inferred type definition, but they miss the point and in fact may just open the door to errors. Old VB6 hands aren't looking for the ability to write loose or sloppy code - they just want a more flexible tool, one where the compiler does more work to save the programmer's time, so we can get a working product out the door more quickly, That's always what VB was about, and Microsoft somewhat lost sight of that. Oh well,,.

User review
Not a good grasp of programming
It is very sad that this book is as bad as it is. I would recommend almost any other book for .NET if you actually want to know what you are doing. There are a FEW good examples, but it ends there.

This person actually says english and art people are better programmers than math and science people because most ALL apps today use little or no math. What an idiot. If anyone has written code for ANYTHING you will find that you use math a lot!

They also don't understand why and when you use the New keyword aka the difference between shared (static) and Instance Methods.
There are many errors in this book, and the author(s) have a vague understanding at best of programming in general.

I could go on and on, but hopefully this will give you enough knowledge to avoid this book and get a book you can learn something from.

User review
Not Scared to Be Critical of .NET
First of all, we all know that .NET harnesses way more power that VB6. However, we also know what a pain it was when we had to make that leap to adjust our thinking to the new platform, and quite frankly it was a hard one for most of us. Things that seemed rather easy before were made unnessarily difficult. (Or so it seemed to us VB6 programmers).

Well this book starts right off the bat explaining the `Why's` of that and is not shy to be honest. I appreciate that, especially after reading about 7 books on my book-shelf which highly extols .NET

Make no mistake about it, dotnet IS better, but the honesty these authors exhibit while explaining features (that no other dotnet book has that I have seen) is most refreshing.

Great book, but is somewhat advanced. The first chapter is worth its weight in gold. If you know VB6 very well and know VB.NET somewhat, this book will help you.

This will help the adjustment and transition to .NET more smoorther for advanced VB6 programmers.


User review
Great informative book
I have purchased several vb.net books over the past couple of years, somewhere around 6-7 books. None were as informative and precise as this book. The authors provide many details that all the other books do not cover. They give many inside details that otherwise many programmers like myself would probably never know. Chapter 1 alone gives a lot of insight into the .net framework that all of my other books did not provide. Without going into every aspect of this book that makes it stand out above the rest, I'll just say this,,.I've completed more of my project with this book than all of the other books combined. Also, check out books by the Murach publishers; they come in at a somewhat distant second, but these books have been of great help also.

User review
Great VB .NET book with a lot of material
This is a must have book for Visual Basic programmers. It has a lot of practical tools to give your programs the edge.