The Microsoft .NET platform is improving from year to year. It has become a mature solution for developers, thanks to its support of a wide variety of languages and its large Web community, including those coming from the Linux world thanks to the Mono project (Linux .NET implementation). Besides C++ and C#, Microsoft added its famous and well-known language Visual Basic (VB) to the major .NET languages. By doing so, Visual Basic .NET has been drastically improved and has become a real object-oriented language. Visual Basic .NET 2005 has been updated with new concepts from .NET version 2.0, including generics and operator overloading.

This book is about VB 2005 and the .NET 2.0 platform. The author discusses all aspects of the VB 2005 language—numbers, strings, classes, and enumerations—by presenting a problem, its solution, and interesting discussions.

The book is organized into seven parts. The first part introduces VB 2005 and the .NET platform. It is a complete introduction to the .NET platform, the .NET type system, and various development tools. The second part deals with the fundamentals of the VB 2005 language. All of the core aspects of the VB 2005 programming language are explored in depth. The third part treats the core object-oriented techniques. Encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism are described, as well as how VB 2005 supports them. The fourth part covers advanced object-oriented techniques, such as generics and operator overloading. The fifth part is about .NET assemblies. It explains how to deploy and configure .NET code libraries and how to construct multithreaded applications. The sixth part introduces the .NET base class libraries. All of the major .NET libraries are discussed. Finally, the last part is dedicated to Web applications and Extensible Markup Language (XML) Web services. The author presents all of the features of the ASP.NET language, and describes how to write XML Web services.

All 28 chapters are well written. An introduction is given at the beginning of each chapter, and the core of the chapter explains in detail the described technique by adding examples and commenting on them. Finally, a summary is given at the end for recalling the various points discussed within the chapter.

This book has very few drawbacks. Nevertheless, it could include a CD-ROM containing the .NET framework 2.0 software development kit (SDK), and the open-source integrated development environment (IDE) SharpDevelop, which allows users to build .NET programs with either VB 2005 or C# 2005, in order to ease the testing process. All of the examples described were downloaded from the book’s Web site and tested. I also appreciated the highlighting of lines of code within the book.

This book will help anyone who is interested learn more about the VB 2005 language. I sincerely recommended it as a valuable VB 2005 reference.