Thanks to the improvements done through the multiple versions of Visual Basic (VB), VB 2005 has become a real object-oriented language. VB 2005 now uses the Microsoft .NET platform, and VB.NET 2005 has been updated with new concepts from .NET version 2.0, including generics and operator overloading.

Patrick discusses all aspects of the VB 2005 language by presenting a complete application, “The Library Project,” in which each chapter is dedicated to a specific aspect of the language. The book is well organized, an introduction is given at the beginning of each chapter, and the core of the chapter explains in detail a technique by explaining its relation to the application project.

The book starts by explaining .NET in an easy-to-understand manner. Chapter 2 introduces VB 2005 by presenting the aspects of the VB language (functions, iterations, and so on). An introduction to the library project is next. Here, the author describes the different phases required for building a computer application project. Chapter 4 deals with databases, and all of the tables needed within the application are presented. The next chapter, “.NET Assemblies,” explains the assemblies of the project.

The next several chapters cover data types in VB 2005; Windows forms; controls of the Windows user interface; classes, inheritance, and error handling; database connections with ADO.NET; application security operator overloading; and the Extensible Markup Language.

Later chapters deal with application settings; files and directories, generics, and graphics; customization through localization and globalization; printing and reporting; and the steps needed to add a license to the application. The final part of the book deals with Web development; how to deploy the application; and the project library and how to install it.

It is hard to find drawbacks with this book. Nevertheless, a CD-ROM containing the Visual Basic, Express Edition 2005 and the source of the library project should have been included in order to ease the experimentation. However, the complete application project described within the book can be downloaded from the publisher’s Web site and correctly tested. The author’s pedagogic style is commendable; for example, he inserts snippets of source code for building the application project inside each chapter. This book will help anyone to learn about VB 2005 by building a complete application project. I sincerely recommend it.