INTRODUCTION

It has been said that Sir Isaac Newton was the last person to know everything. He was an accomplished physicist (his three laws of motion were the basis of classical mechanics, which defi ned astrophysics for three centuries), mathematician (he was one of the inventors of calculus and developed Newton ’ s Method for fi nding roots of equations), astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist (okay, maybe the last one was a mistake). He invented the refl ecting telescope, a theory of color, a law of cooling, and studied the speed of sound.

Just as important, he was born before relativity, quantum mechanics, gene sequencing, thermo dynamics, parallel computation, and a swarm of other extremely diffi cult branches of science.

If you ever used Visual Basic 3, you too could have known everything. Visual Basic 3 was a reasonably small but powerful language. Visual Basic 4 added classes to the language and made Visual Basic much more complicated. Versions 4, 5, and 6 added more support for database programming and other topics such as custom controls, but Visual Basic was still a fairly understandable language, and if you took the time you could become an expert in just about all of it.

Visual Basic .NET changed the language in much more fundamental ways and made it much harder to understand every last detail of Visual Basic. The .NET Framework added powerful new tools to Visual Basic, but those tools came at the cost of increased complexity. Associated technologies have been added to the language at an ever - increasing rate, so today it is impossible for anyone to be an expert on every topic that deals with Visual Basic.

To cover every nook and cranny in Visual Basic you would need an in - depth understanding of database technologies, custom controls, custom property editors, XML, cryptography, serialization, two - and three - dimensional graphics, multi - threading, refl ection, the code document object model (DOM), diagnostics, globalization, Web Services, inter - process communication, work fl ow, Offi ce, ASP, Windows Forms, WPF, and much more.

This book doesn ’ t even attempt to cover all of these topics. Instead, it provides a broad, solid understanding of essential Visual Basic topics. It explains the powerful development environment that makes Visual Basic such a productive language. It describes the Visual Basic language itself and explains how to use it to perform a host of important development tasks.

It also explains the forms, controls, and other objects that Visual Basic provides for building applications in a modern windowing environment.

This book may not cover every possible topic related to Visual Basic, but it does cover the majority of the technologies that developers need to build sophisticated applications.