Getting Started with Visual Basic

Visual Basic (frequently abbreviated as VB) is a wonderful Object Oriented Programming language that is easy to learn and write Windows programs with. Windows uses a Graphical User Interface (GUI, pronounced "gooey") that is easy to use. Because of its ease of use, Visual Basic has become a very popular programming language that is used in many disciplines.

Visual Basic is a fully Object Oriented Programming (referred to as OOP) language. It has everything you would expect: inheritance, polymorphism, and classes. This book is based on Visual Basic .NET 2015, but can be used with any version between 2010-2017.

Creating your first program is easy and will take you no more than five minutes (literally)! That's one of the things that make Visual Basic so great.

Approach

This book is different than any other textbook out there. I wanted a text book that was step-by-step, got straight to the point, covered all the topics, and did that in a minimum number of pages. To accomplish that I only cover the objects and controls and their properties, methods, and events that are necessary to complete the example and assignments. This means it may take several chapters to describe an object or control fully; each time adding content to its usage.

The idea I have followed is that the book would remain on the shorter side without sacrificing content or explanation. The book averages 29 pages per chapter. Each chapter has an average of 26 figures. The printed version of the book will be just over 400 pages. In order to keep the book smaller, I tried to stick with only one In-Chapter Example for each chapter and spend the entire chapter building on that.

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For the Student

Students will learn the fundamentals of Microsoft Windows programming using the Visual Basic .NET programming language. The course is an introductory programming course and will include designing, implementing, and testing Visual Basic .NET programs, which will provide useful Windows applications to solve representative problems for business, science, mathematics, and engineering. This course is intended for students majoring in Business or CIS or those desiring to increase their programming skills.

To get the most out of the book, it is recommended that you complete the In-Chapter project for each chapter. The In-Chapter project has been designed to use and explain all the information that will be learned in the chapter. There are many screenshots of each In-Chapter project as it is being built including a complete program listing at the end of the chapter if you get stuck at any point. Everything you need to complete the In-Chapter project and assignments is included in the chapter (or previous chapters), so looking for help on the Internet should not be needed.

Visual Basic statements are shown in a fixed width font or a screenshot of the code inside Visual Basic. Student supplied input that is required in statements, including object/control names or values, is in italics. Also, when you're instructed to perform a task, such as click on the File menu option, that item is listed in italics.

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For the Instructor

Each chapter focuses on one In-Chapter project. This project is shown from design, creation, and testing and includes a screenshot of the running program and a complete program listing. All of the controls, properties, methods, events, and programming constructs needed to accomplish that are discussed in the chapter (or had been previously discussed). Each chapter is held to a minimum number of pages averaging one figure for every written page.

The book is intended to move from Chapter 1 through Chapter 12. Chapter 0 is the setup required to ready the student to program in Visual Basic. Since installing Visual Studio does take quite a bit of time, making it the first week's project might be useful or it can be skipped by the instructor. This is why it was named Chapter 0 - Chapter 1 is where the real work begins. The Appendixes can be inserted at any time the instructor feels it will help the student, or can be left for the student to examine on their own.

Chapter assignments come in three difficulty levels. Level 1 assignments (ChapterNumber-1) give the most help to the student by providing a drawing of what the assignment form could look like. Level 2 assignments (ChapterNumber-2) give test data and output results that the student may try on their own. Level 3 assignments (ChapterNumber-3) are the most challenging by providing neither a form drawing nor input/output results. Any of these assignments could be made easier by supplying the student with hints (in the form of screenshots or data) that they could use.

Text Features

Each chapter begins with identifiable objectives and a brief overview including all the objects/controls with their properties, methods, and events the reader will encounter. Each chapter has an In-Chapter Project demonstrating the concepts being learned, including many full color screenshots of the IDE, program, and printouts.

Plenty of whitespace has been added to keep the text from being cluttered. Code examples use a fixed width font. Where color would enhance the text examples it has been used. Where color would only distract from the material the text is simply black.

The Appendixes include material that can be learned at any time. They are left out of a chapter for that reason. While they can be read at any time during the course of the book, earlier rather than later will benefit the student.

The index lists both the chapter number the word or phrase appears in as well as the page number. This is to help identify the page that will be helpful more quickly.

Changes in This Edition

This is the third and final edition using Visual Basic 2015. The next edition will focus on Visual Basic 2017 - look for that edition in the Summer of 2019.

This edition includes format changes to beautify it for publication and new additional assignments.

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